Ep. 247 - Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray "Fish With Feet: Human Evolution and the Image of God" pt. 1

[00:00:00] I mentioned the don't take Tylenol or your child will get autism thing. There was a study that demonstrated a very low correlation between a pregnant woman taking Tylenol and having a child with autism.

[00:00:15] However, any good scientific researcher will tell you you have to control for outside possibilities of something other than what you are looking at making the difference in what you were seeing in outcome. The actual lead researcher on that Tylenol study that was touted as, my goodness, you pregnant women, you're ruining your children. Don't take Tylenol.

[00:00:45] And it was just given, here's a research study that said this. The lead researcher on that study said there was a very small correlation. Welcome to the The Deconstructionists. Welcome back. I'm your host, John Williamson. And this week we are continuing our conversation with Dr. Janet Kellogg.

[00:01:10] And in part two, we widen the lens considerably. We talk about the growing loss of trust in the medical and scientific communities, how that distrust took root and what can happen when legitimate questions and institutional failures become fertile ground for claims that simply aren't supported by credible evidence, including the renewed suggestion that Tylenol causes autism. But this isn't only a conversation about debunking one claim.

[00:01:36] It's about why these ideas become so persuasive, how misinformation can offer people the certainty they're searching for, and the very real consequences that follow when fear travels faster than evidence. We also wrestle with an important question. How do we acknowledge the ways institutions have sometimes failed people without abandoning expertise altogether?

[00:01:58] Because rebuilding trust requires more than telling people they're wrong. It requires honesty, humility, accountability, and a willingness to understand why that trust disappeared in the first place. Before we jump back in, I also want to remind you that our new podcast, This Is Who We Become, is coming soon. We have an extraordinary and incredibly diverse group of guests already lined up, with many more announcements on the way.

[00:02:24] So the best thing you can do if you want to check it out is to head over to thisiswhowebecome.com and join the mailing list, so you can keep up with new guest announcements, launch details, and everything we're building around the show. Again, that's thisiswhowebecome.com. All right, let's get back into our conversation with Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray.

[00:02:55] That's really cool. I haven't often heard about the DNA or the genetic sequencing as much, but I think that's a really huge piece of evidence that doesn't often get discussed. I watched some years ago, I'm sure you saw it too, the debate between Ken Ham, who's famous for the Creation Museum, and Bill Nye, the science guy.

[00:03:22] And I wish Bill had pushed back on certain points a little bit harder, but Ken, like a lot of folks who deny, who are largely science deniers, kept pushing back on things like the isotopic, what do they call it, the radiocarbon dating. And why that just wasn't reliable enough. And I thought, well, you know, I really wanted Bill to go into that a little bit more.

[00:03:50] And then also the other evidence, as you just suggested, that aside from radiocarbon dating, that all point sort of in the same direction. Other evidence besides radiocarbon dating? Yeah, yeah. I just, I felt like, you know, that was just one piece of evidence that he kind of kept pushing back on. I'm like, come on, Bill. I know. You know. Oh, yeah. Let's go. Let's give it some more.

[00:04:15] Well, and then, and just at the bottom, at the very basis, carbon dating doesn't go back very far. I mean, radiometric dating, you can go back billions of years, but carbon dating, it doesn't go back. So that's not necessarily a useful thing in providing evidence for evolution. But DNA has absolutely been a game changer.

[00:04:38] And so, you know, for example, humans share almost 99% of our coding DNA with chimpanzees. And interestingly, and again, many people find this insulting, humans and chimps are each other's closest living relatives. Now, we humans have had closer relatives in the past, but they're all extinct.

[00:05:05] Chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. In fact, humans and chimpanzees are far more closely related than our chimpanzees and gorillas. We are each other's closest living relatives. And so there is that piece of evidence. We share DNA with not only with the primates, but with mice, even with fruit flies, with mushrooms.

[00:05:35] You can insert human DNA into a yeast and they will work because we share the same DNA. But here's been a huge one. And I write about it in Fish with Feet. And that is the study into endogenous retroviruses or ERVs. If I get tripped up by saying endogenous retrovirus too many times.

[00:06:00] But a retrovirus is a RNA virus that when it infects a cell, it's able to reverse transcriptase and make a DNA copy of itself, which it can then insert into the nucleus of the cell that it infected. If it infects a body cell, skin cell, lung cell, muscle cell, whatever.

[00:06:30] It's going to impact that person. But none of the offspring of that person. But if an ERV, an endogenous, if a retrovirus happens to infect a germ cell, the cells that produce eggs, the cells that produce sperm.

[00:06:51] And if the retrovirus inserts its DNA into the germ cells that make eggs and sperm, then that viral DNA will be passed on to all generations from that point on. And so what we find in human DNA, in fact, the Human Genome Project, this was a big surprise. They found that so a large percentage of human DNA was actually viral DNA.

[00:07:22] Scars of past viral infections. So these are called endogenous retroviruses, retrovirus infections that happened eons of time ago in our life history. So what we found is that there's one particular family of ERVs that we looked at.

[00:07:47] There are 211 incidences in humans of this one particular family of ERVs. There are 208 incidences of infection in the chimpanzee line, the chimpanzee DNA of this same family. But here's the big news. 205 of those infections are in common.

[00:08:14] In humans and in chimpanzees, they're inserted into the same chromosomes in the same places. 205 out of 211. And so you have to ask yourself, if humans and chimpanzees were specially created,

[00:08:34] how do we have the exact infections by the exact same viruses that infected and retro-coded their DNA into the same exact places in the genome, in the same spot?

[00:08:56] This has been a big problem for creationists, because it's hard to explain from a creationist perspective, because it looks like on the surface that God is trying to trick us. Why would God make it look like humans and chimpanzees shared a lineage by having infections in the same chromosome,

[00:09:23] in the same spot, to such an enormous degree? Todd Wood is a young Earth creationist who writes a lot. And I have respect for Todd Wood because he is intellectually honest. I disagree with his conclusions, but I respect the thinking process that he goes through. And so what he has said in addressing ERVs, endogenous retroviruses, is he said,

[00:09:52] either we've experienced mutations that are exactly the same in chimps, in the exact same locations, or those mutations were created that way in the beginning. So he acknowledges the perplexity, or he acknowledges the problem.

[00:10:15] But because Wood is a young Earth creationist, and it's not unique with him, there is usually among these honestly seeking creationists, there'll be the idea of, well, we don't know, but we're eventually going to find out the answer. And it's going to point toward a creationist's answer. And so that is Wood's conclusion.

[00:10:43] Also, he concludes that the presence of human and chimp ERVs in the same locations are merely apparent. Because he says creation is the simpler explanation, that these are simply apparent. They are simply coincidental. So there's that. Yeah, that's always the interesting part to me is the mental gymnastics

[00:11:11] that one must undertake to continue to combat the evidence. Because obviously, you know, over time, as with any scientific field, you know, and as technology advances, we have more and more information, you know, that we have to deal with. And as new information comes to light, it seems like, you know, I've heard all sorts of theories like, well, you know, it, the Earth just, God just made the Earth look millions of years old.

[00:11:39] Like, why? Yeah. Right. Like, for what purpose? So that we could have this dumb debate now? Like, why? Why? Yeah. What does it say about the nature of God? If our genomes were designed to look just like we would expect to did look if we shared ancestry with all life, but in fact we don't. It's deceptive.

[00:12:10] Is that within the nature of God to be deceptive? And not only that, and the fact that we are related and that using genetics we can determine how closely related we are allows us to make scientific advances and scientists, scientific discoveries that we would never be able to make,

[00:12:38] that we wouldn't be able to predict these advances, predict these discoveries, if it was just an individual specially created, we're just going to make you look like you're related, but you're really not. A lot of the early research in treating HIV AIDS was done on our closely related primate ancestors, because we are so closely related to them, and they also get a form of HIV AIDS.

[00:13:08] And so if it was only apparent that we were closely related, we wouldn't have been able to learn what we were able to learn from these medical studies with our closely related species. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, I always love having you on because I always learn something new, but... I don't know if you recall. I love to talk. I tell my friends, don't ask me a question if you don't want a mini lecture, because I'm going to talk about it. I just can't. I can't hold it in.

[00:13:37] By the end of this, I'm going to ask you like what the latest stuff is you're geeking out on? Because last time you were on, I don't know if you recall this, but we got into this great conversation about vaccines and mRNA vaccines, and you kind of walked me through it. And I've been fascinated, and I tell anyone who will listen, what an insane sort of miracle this technology is as a result. So we'll definitely get into that.

[00:14:02] But what are some of the examples of the what you call evolutionary workarounds and imperfect designs that you mentioned in the book? Well, like I said, we carry within our physical bodies, our own physical bodies that we are walking around in. We carry the evidence, for example, that we are fish. Here's a really well-known one.

[00:14:30] In fish, in males, the testes are kept high up within the body of a fish. But no problem, no big deal, because fish are cold-blooded, because sperm will die or become inactivated in warm temperatures. But in mammals, that would not work. In human mammals, including humans, the testes, like fish, start up high in the body.

[00:14:58] But in mammals that are warm-blooded, those testes begin to descend through the body cavity to the body wall, and out-pouching forms. And that out-pouching becomes the scrotum, so that the testes are held outside the body cavity in mammals, including humans, where the sperm can thrive.

[00:15:24] The problem is, when the testes pouches out of the body wall, it leaves a weakness in the body wall. And males, humans, are therefore susceptible to hernias. Hernias, a loop of intestine, can drop down in through that weak part in the body wall. So if you've ever suffered a hernia, you're a male, that's due to your fishy ancestors.

[00:15:53] But women, females, don't totally escape our fishy past. Fish have ovaries, like humans do. But when fish lay their eggs, they shed their eggs from their ovaries directly into the water. Okay? Mammals, in the mammal lineage, that doesn't work, because mammals gestate their young inside their body.

[00:16:20] So an aftermarket adaptation in mammals are the fallopian tubes that are meant to carry the egg from the ovary down into the uterus where the embryo develops. Problem. The ovary that sheds the egg is not connected to the fallopian tube.

[00:16:45] Most of the time, the egg spans the difference, gets in the fallopian tube, and travels down to the uterus. But not always. Sometimes, the egg doesn't clear the distance. Sometimes, an egg will be fertilized outside of the fallopian tube, and the embryo will implant somewhere else inside the woman's body.

[00:17:15] Sometimes, a fertilized egg will get turned around and go backwards, back out of the fallopian tube. Sometimes, they will implant in the fallopian tube. Sometimes, they will implant outside the fallopian tube in the body cavity. Regardless, any implantation outside the uterus is called an ectopic pregnancy.

[00:17:39] Ectopic pregnancies are almost always deadly for the embryo, and quite often without medical intervention, deadly for the mother as well. Ectopic pregnancies are a result of our connection to our fishy past. No problem for fish to shed their eggs directly.

[00:18:02] Can be a problem when mammals inherited that same setup, and it doesn't clear the distance into the uterus. There's lots of other things. Hiccups. In fish, the brain stem that controls the breathing is right next to the gills that do the breathing. In humans, brain stem, a long way away from the diaphragm. That's a long... We still have that same nerve setup, but it's a much longer trip.

[00:18:31] A lot can go wrong nerve-wise along that journey with that impulse to breathe. And so, we experience that as hiccups. How our faces come together as embryos. All vertebrate embryos start out looking a lot like fish. To Google for that. Humans start out with eyes on the sides of our head like fish are. And through embryological development, all the pieces come together like a puzzle.

[00:19:00] Usually, they'll come together and fit together as they should. Occasionally, the pieces are a bit off. And then you'll have a child born with a cleft lip or a cleft palate. Because the fishiness of the face coming together didn't quite come together as it should. And I'll just give you one more example because I love this. Even our bone structure. Think about your limbs, your arms, your legs.

[00:19:28] You've got one big bone, two smaller bones, lots of little bones of a wrist or an ankle. And then bones of a digits of fingers or toes. One bone, two bones, lots of little bones, digits, fingers or toes. The first animal that we find that limb structure in, that limb architecture in, is a fish.

[00:19:53] The first animal to have one bone, two bones, blobby bones, digit bones was a fish. And so we carry in our bodies the history of our connection to fish and a myriad of other examples of our ancestry, our sharing of a common lineage with other forms of life in our family tree. Oh, that's interesting.

[00:20:23] I have to ask because this one comes up a lot. When you're sort of getting pushback, it is, well, it's just a theory. That's just a theory. Do you think that many Christians misunderstand what scientists actually mean when they use the word theory? Absolutely not.

[00:20:44] I teach introductory biology courses and I literally talk about this on the first lecture when we talk about science thinking, how does science work? And then I don't, I just use the vocabulary of evolution throughout the semester. And then at the end of the semester, we tie it all together and I hit evolution hard and we go back to what do scientists mean when they use the term theory?

[00:21:13] So it's not like we use it in everyday life. Like my theory is my Dallas Cowboys are going to win it all this year. You know, that's just hopeful thinking and not the way a scientist would use the term theory. When scientists use the word theory, they're talking about something about which they are quite certain. And a hypothesis is what scientists use to investigate observed phenomena.

[00:21:42] I observe that this thing happens. My hypothesis is a proposed explanation for why this thing happens. So scientists start their studies with hypotheses. Well, when a hypothesis continues to be supported, like the reason I'm noticing this observed thing, is the same hypothesis, my same explanation every single time.

[00:22:10] If a hypothesis continues to be supported year after year, decade after decade, in multiple labs across the planet by multiple researchers for decades, then a hypothesis will obtain the rank, so to speak, or the elevation, so to speak, of being a theory.

[00:22:33] And when people say that, oh, evolution is not a fact, it's just a theory, I always say, in the hierarchy of terms, theories rank above everything. Because it's a theory that tells you why a fact is how it is. A fact that you observe, a theory will tell you why what you're observing is true and why it's happening.

[00:23:02] A theory is higher than a law, because a theory tells you why the laws work. So if you're going to rank your science vocabulary, a theory is the overarching foundation of any area of research. And I tell my students, you know, if you have to have surgery and your surgeon rushes into the room and says, oh, I'm so sorry, I'm running late.

[00:23:30] You don't mind if I don't wash my hands or sterilize my instruments, do you? Because after all, germ theory is just a theory. You know, you'd be out of there. Are you going to jump out of an airplane without a parachute? Because gravitational theory is just a theory. No. Evolution theory carries the same weight. In addition to being upheld and supported over decades of time by multiple labs, multiple scientists,

[00:23:59] scientists, a science theory has predictive power. A theory that is valid will predict where we will find new information. And time and time and time again, evolution theory has proved to be invaluable in predicting new knowledge.

[00:24:22] The fossil called Tiktaalik was the first fish that we found with that bone structure that I talked about. The one bone, two bones, lots of little wrist bones or ankle bones and digits. The scientist that discovered Tiktaalik is named Neil Shubin. Neil Shubin was a fish paleontologist. He knew the age of rock where fish are found. He knew the age of rock where the first four limbed creatures are found.

[00:24:51] So evolution theory led him to predict, if I'm going to find a fish that is showing changes to be an animal to live on land, showing these changes to four limbs, I'm going to find that creature in an age of rock in between where we find fish fish and where we find four limbed animals. He predicted it.

[00:25:18] And that is where he found it. He didn't just go digging willy nilly. Evolution theory allows you to predict where certain fossils will be found. That's amazing. I love that. I got to ask this because I'm fascinated with this concept as well. And you touched on it a little bit earlier, but you draw from ancient Near Eastern context and discussing the image of God.

[00:25:47] How does that historical lens change the way Genesis gets read? Well, you know, Pete Innes is an Old Testament scholar that I love to read. And he talks about reading the Old Testament, Genesis included, with ancient eyes.

[00:26:06] Innes and other scholars of the Old Testament will testify that recording events to 21st century people is not the same as an ancient Near Eastern person would record an event. Truth, what is meant to be true or truth, is not the same to a 21st century person

[00:26:33] as it would have been to an ancient Near Eastern person. People in the ancient Near East were much more concerned with meaning. So if they are going to relate a story, the facts and the figures and the timeline isn't going to be important. What's going to be important is infusing meaning into what they are trying to convey.

[00:27:00] And so if we read Genesis, if we read the creation stories through the eyes of the original readers and writers, we can understand that meaning was what is important, not a scientific timeline, not a recipe book. Here is how God did it.

[00:27:26] And I talk a little bit about this in the book in Fish with Feet. But many people may be surprised to learn that there are Sumerian and Babylonian and Egyptian creation stories and other creation stories coming out of other cultures around Israel in the ancient Near East that are very similar to the Genesis creation story.

[00:27:54] Because that's how those people who shared a cultural air, they shared very close languages, they shared culture together, different people groups, but they were of the same culture. They had a common understanding of how the material world came to be. It was just like we know night is dark, day is light. That's how those people understood the natural world to be.

[00:28:24] Now what did the writers of Genesis do? When they told their story through their eyes, through their beliefs, they infused what everybody already knew with their meaning. So it wasn't about a step-by-step project.

[00:28:45] It was about how these early writers infused meaning into a very common cultural belief about how the material world came to be. Yeah, I love that. Pete Enns is a great guy and I love his work as well. So I have to ask you, so I had to make sure we had time left at the end. Okay, so a lot has changed since last time we spoke.

[00:29:12] And so it just feels like every year that goes by, it's like 10 years in the past, you know, in terms of how rapidly technology is just advancing at this point. You know, you mentioned HIV and AIDS earlier, and I remember as a child of the 80s into the 90s, you know, back then, like that was the scariest word ever because that was a death sentence. Like you were, if you got it, that was it. Right. And now, you know, I was remarking to a friend the other day,

[00:29:41] it's insane to me now that they, you know, when they first came out with a treatment for it, it was just a cocktail, like just a ton of different medications you would take just to keep it at bay and hopefully extend your life a few more years. Now, like you could take one pill and essentially it negates it to the point where it's undetectable and untransmittable. So, you know, basically, you know, the doorstep of a cure for all intents and purposes.

[00:30:08] And it's no longer a death sentence like it was in the 80s. For the rest of your life. Yeah. It's incredible. And not think about it again. Yep. Right. It's just like, I mean, to me, that's miraculous. Thank you. And so I think about things like that. And I think about some of the other advances in technology. And so what are some of the things on the horizon that you've seen? And this is kind of a twofold question, because I'm also fascinated with AI technology

[00:30:34] and sort of where and the good things that could come about. And I've looked into it to a large extent. We use it a lot at work now. But in what ways could that really help speed things up a little bit in terms of maybe the scientific advancements that traditionally have taken a really long time and a lot of manpower to achieve? So so I guess what are what are some of the things that you're really excited about that are on the horizon?

[00:31:02] And what is like kind of in store with this new technology that we have at our disposal? Well, you know, mRNA technology is fascinating to me. I can't really quote exact stats off the top of my head, but I know I've read a lot of good

[00:31:24] research, exciting research that's being done with mRNA therapy and treating cancers, making it very personal to the treatments of these different devastating diseases. You know, I'm trying to I'm trying to think it exact.

[00:31:48] My husband's a dermatologist and I seem to recall him talking about some research with melanoma, but I'm not going to speak. I'm not going to step into his field, but I will know. But I do know that using this mRNA technology has tremendous potential in medicine, specifically

[00:32:08] because it's so easy to make it, to specify it, to make it be what you need it to be. And that was a big problem during the COVID pandemic because everybody was so afraid of this vaccine that came out so fast. But the but the thing is, we've been studying. We had been studying mRNA vaccines for decades.

[00:32:37] And what we found was they were very easily customizable. That's the word I'm looking for. They're very easily customizable. And you can do it in a blink of an eye, basically in the right laboratory. And so what people saw as a too quick vaccine was technology that had been around for decades.

[00:33:04] But that technology allowed us to specialize in a few days the vaccine that's needed at hand. So that excites me. You know, I don't want to be Debbie Downer, but there has been I've been very discouraged in the last year or so

[00:33:24] within the area of research because in the current political environment, science research has been absolutely gutted. Absolutely gutted. The National Institutes of Health that for years was overseen by Francis Collins has been just hogtied.

[00:33:50] The CDC experts have all been forced to resign or have been fired. And so it's it's I don't want to be too dramatic, but it is a tragedy.

[00:34:03] One of the fallouts of this tragedy, and I don't know if you've heard about this, but there has been a tremendous uptake in newborns bleeding to death in modern United States of America.

[00:34:23] In the modern advanced world, we have newborns that are bleeding to death at birth because parents are refusing to give their child a vitamin K injection. It's not even a vaccine. But we have thrown such distrust and shade on our science establishment.

[00:34:47] What's coming out of Washington has been so depressing to me so that people no longer have the CDC, the NIH, that they can trust to get accurate information from. Not only that, if they're seeking information, we are having this general distrust of information, you know, drink raw unpasteurized milk.

[00:35:14] You know, don't take Tylenol if you're pregnant. I could just go on and on with this misinformation that's being promulgated. And one of the bits of misinformation is this parental refusal of vitamin K. Infants don't make it initially. Breast milk doesn't have enough in it initially. And so for decades at birth, infants have been injected with vitamin K.

[00:35:42] But because of a myriad of reasons, parents are no longer trusting. And it's not even a vaccination. It's a vitamin. It's a vitamin. It's literally vitamin K. But because we have created this atmosphere of distrust of science, of distrust of vaccination,

[00:36:01] and we've fired all the people who could tell us differently, that's one very serious fallout of our current scientific environment. Yeah, it's been hard to watch as somebody who's a huge proponent of science and scientific advancement. And, you know, definitely not lost on me the benefits of a lot of these advancements. My grandfather, you know, had polio as a child.

[00:36:30] Mm-hmm. And you better bet, like, had he had the opportunity to take the polio vaccine before, you know, being exposed to it, he absolutely would have. I mean, it hindered him his entire life. You know, he walked with a limp in his younger years, then evolved to a cane and the walker and then wheelchair, you know, when he was older. Right. Yeah. You know.

[00:36:50] We had an older family member, she's since passed, but she had polio as a child and struggled her whole adult life with that post-polio scenario. Yeah. And, you know, and every once in a while you'll see, you know, anti-vaccine, anti-medicine, people post things on social media, like, you know, why do we need all these vaccines?

[00:37:18] When's the last time you saw anybody with polio or measles? Well, because they took a vaccine. That's why we don't see people with polio. Yeah. That's why we don't see people with, but now we see measles. You know, that's a whole other thing we could talk about is the outbreak of measles and the United States losing its status as a country in which measles had been eliminated. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we had an outbreak here in Ohio not that long ago.

[00:37:48] I mean, we saw it in the news and I was like, oh, geez. Yeah. Well, here in Texas, we were ground zero for it. You know, West Texas where it started and it spread because I heard this stat. I love to listen to epidemiologists talk about disease. Maybe in my next career I'll do that. But it was talking about the ability of certain viruses to spread.

[00:38:13] It's called an R naught number and I'm going to be able, I'm not going to be able to state these specifically, but like, you know, a flu or cold has got like an R naught of two, one or two. Meaning that a person with it's infected, how many other people are they going to infect? COVID initially had an R naught of about three. You know, one person with COVID could infect about three others, but with the Omicron variant, it jumped up to about 10.

[00:38:45] Measles has an R naught and I think it was around 30, 29 or 30. So one person with measles can infect. Measles is one of the most infectious diseases we know, but yet we're not getting vaccinated for it. And measles is not a simply a benign childhood disease.

[00:39:12] It can cause very serious side effects as we've seen since in the last couple of years as vaccination rates across the country have plummeted. Yeah. And it's for something that's completely preventable that we've had a vaccine around for years and years and years. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me wonder if, you know, it's really going to stagnate the scientific advancement, at least in the United States.

[00:39:39] And then we're going to start seeing all these amazing, uh, advancements occurring in other countries. Right. Oh, we're already, we're already losing our scientists. I read probably a year ago that our scientists are leaving for, um, Australia and China, that we are losing our scientists to Australia and China. Wow. That we used to have people that would work here and, you know, who knows?

[00:40:09] Who knows if, if American science will recover or how long it will take if we do, you know, I'm, I'm an eternal optimist. So I keep thinking with a, a different mindset, we can recover, but I don't know that we'll recover all the scientists that we've lost over the last year and a half. Yeah. And it's, it's such a strange battle that we're in for, for something that should be apolitical. You know, I think we can all agree like, Hey, we want to have a healthy society. Right.

[00:40:38] Uh, we should put all of our best, uh, minds on, you know, the worst illnesses and, and create treatments and cures and things like that. That should be nonpartisan, you know, or bipartisan rather, um, nonpartisan, bipartisan, whichever. Whatever. Either one. People should be for it. Yeah. You know, all people should be for it regardless of your political disposition. Um, and yet here we are, you know, in, in 2026, where according to back to the future, we're, we're supposed to have flying cars by now.

[00:41:08] Right. And I don't even know that full cars, but like we're going backwards when it comes to, uh, you know, science and just academics in general. Like it, it's just bizarre. Well, you know, and again, this goes back to one of your first questions today is do people in general understand how science works?

[00:41:30] Uh, and I think this is a, the, the source of much, much misunderstanding is that we have a dearth of scientific literacy, um, in our society, in our culture, in our country. Uh, I, I mentioned the don't take Tylenol or your child will get autism thing.

[00:41:49] Well, there was a study, uh, that demonstrated a very low, um, correlation between, um, a pregnant woman taking Tylenol and having a child with autism.

[00:42:05] However, any good scientific researcher will tell you, you have to control for outside, uh, possibilities of something other than what you are looking at, making the difference in what you were seeing in outcome.

[00:42:28] The actual lead researcher on that Tylenol study that was touted as, Oh my goodness, you pregnant women, you're ruining your children. Don't take Tylenol. And it was just given it here as a research study that said this, the lead, the lead researcher on that study said there was a very small correlation.

[00:42:52] But when they controlled for family, looked at the rest of the family, looked at other siblings in a family group, guess what? The incident fell to zero to zero, but that's not what got reported.

[00:43:14] And we don't understand this basic scientific research concept of controlling for anything that could interfere with your outcome. These scientists did it the right way. They controlled for family, think family circumstances and what's going on with the, in the family here. And when they controlled for family, it fell to zero, but no, it was the Tylenol that did it. Yeah.

[00:43:44] I, I read a recent study that this massive study that took place in Denmark. Yes. Thousands and thousands. Yes. Who specifically looked at the connection between vaccinations and autism. And by the way, I would like to also point out that if you're one of the conspiracy theorists who believes that big pharma influences, you know, study outcomes and that sort of thing. Denmark is not part of the United States. Yeah. I hope you know that. Right.

[00:44:14] And, and, and on, undoubtedly the outcome was that there is no like connection. Like none. Right. Right. And, and I also tell my, my introductory biology students, this, if you think that there is some vast conspiracy cabal of scientists conspiring to hide information from you.

[00:44:40] And I think that's why we heard this all the time during the COVIDs, that the scientists are hiding information. If you think there's this vast worldwide global conspiracy of scientists to hide things from you or to misinform you, then you have no idea how scientists work because they love to prove each other wrong. And if they can prove each other wrong, then they're going to get the prize and not the other guy over here.

[00:45:10] So, you know, if it's just not realistic to think that there's this big secret that, you know, vaccines really do cause autism. And, but we're just keeping it from the public because that's what scientists do. We're the new bad guys. Yeah. Which is, which is absurd. Um, well, I know we're, we're running short on time. Um, I definitely want, uh, to give you a moment to tell people, uh, where to stay up on top of what you're up to, uh, where to get a copy of the new book, which is not out yet. Is that right?

[00:45:39] It, it releases August 13th, I believe. But it's available. Yeah. It's available for pre-order everywhere. So please pre-order it. It gets the numbers up and more people, um, are exposed and curious, but it's called fish with feet. And so, uh, human evolution and the image of God. Uh, and so, like I said, I walk the reader through, uh, the history of human evolution, starting with that little cell in the muck.

[00:46:09] Uh, then we talk about evolution, human evolution from the perspective of, of, uh, DNA. We talk about some of the, uh, problems that arise in our human bodies. Things like our bad backs. Things like our hernias. Things like childbirth. Uh, the danger that women historically have been through childbirth. And how all of that is related to our evolutionary history.

[00:46:36] Uh, and then I end the book talking about Adam and Eve. What do we do with Adam and Eve? If you are a religious person and Adam and Eve is important to you. Um, I, I, I, I, I'm there muddling through it with you. The image of God, same thing. I, uh, address that. How do we reconcile? And honestly, I really liked my last chapter. Cause it's not tied up with a neat little bow.

[00:47:05] I can't tie it up for myself, but basically, you know, I say, here are the facts. Looking away, ignoring it. Is it going to change anything? So if you're a person of faith, now what do you jettison everything? Or do you just broaden yourself? You know, it is what it is. It is what it is. Here's the, here's the research. Here's the evidence. Now, what are you going to do?

[00:47:35] I love it. I love it. Well, I'll have links in the show notes as usual. Um, thank you so much for coming back on. I always feel like I learned something and it's always super fun to talk to you. So thank you so much for coming back. Thanks again for having me. I love to talk to you. I love, these are my favorite topics. So I love it. Awesome. Thank you so much.

[00:50:21] Great. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye.

[00:50:55] Bye. You