Hey everybody, today we're debating Evolution on Trial and we are starting right now with Jen's opening statement. Thanks so much for being with us, Jen. The floor is all yours. Hi, everyone. Great to be here. My name is Jen Sharf. I will be, I don't want to say taking an anti-evolution dance because I don't know if that's accurate, but I want to ask some important questions about the process of what we've come to understand as evolution, which is actually a lot more complicated than it may seem at first glance. Now, why is Jen qualified to speak on this topic? Well, I have a background in physics and math, worked in applied science for seven years for the Royal Canadian Mount of Police as audio video analyst, which involved applying the concepts that I learned in school, as well as interpreting for people who were deaf in university courses. So I got changed proctor and a large number of courses, including law, biology, and teaching. And more recently, I've retired to perform debates and education online, which is what I'm doing right now. So it's great to be here. I just want to thank the platform modern day debate for having me. And everyone remember about DebateCon coming up Saturday. And my interlocutor, Seigart, Dr. Seigart, thank you so much for coming to this conversation. I hope it will be a most productive one. And I will just transfer over to my slideshow. You ready for you? Is it coming through? It is. Great. My attention is with random mutation as the primary driver of speciation slash biological diversity. So I have to kind of be careful when we talk about evolution. What are we referring to? I mean, I've already seen tons of comments in chat. How could you go against evolution is the most obvious thing ever blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know what else was the most obvious thing ever for a really long time? That's right. Flat earth. So I don't really think anyone wants to disagree with the position that life is adapted to its environment. We need look no further than the anglerfish with a light coming out of its head that swims in the great depths, blackness of the oceans. You can see that that came about because of the environment. It's a reaction to the environment that adapted to the environment. I don't see how anyone could push back on that. But at the same time, I don't know why we're so quick to jump from that to particular interpretations of that inevitable reality. Just want to clarify this. I am not trying to make a theological or creationist argument whatever that means, i.e. sky daddy, but together some ingredients sprinkled in some jerks and then whipped it together for some souls. Let's hope that in current year no one is still defending such a position. I don't want to go too much into my position on this. I just want to mostly focus on the issues I've identified with how we understand evolution, aka mutation, adaptation, natural selection. But just to generally give an overview, I think it's important that we hold ourselves the standard of causal closure when we are attempting to formulate scientific theories rather than just excuses. I know nobody likes the P word of panpsychism, but it is really nothing more than the assertion that the basic fact of the universe is that three plus one dimensions are observable. Observable is connected to consciousness. That's all it's really saying. That way life just slides into place without having to require magical thinking to get there. Impersonal idealism won't go into that too much, but we're looking at a mind-centric model. So just to go into a little bit more deeply what we're talking about when we say evolution, there's a lot of things we could be talking about. There's just stick with the modern Bailey fallacy visual, which I've sometimes called the Socratic shuffle. It's a big, big, big, big leap. People talk about leaps of faith. When you get talked about religion, I go out of the gaps. Over that means it leaps of faith. Well, there's a pretty big leap of faith between life being generally adapted to its environment and a causal relation existing between genetics and phenotype, which is essentially how something looks. We also have the claim that the main engine of genetic variation is random mutation, which makes me a little concerned because what's the best evidence that we have that anything can be random? What does that even mean? Even look at computers, random number generators are any of those truly random. We're also expected to believe that beneficial mutations improve intergenerally and then there is not a lot of evidence for this. And it's certainly not a lot of pathways that would appear to line up with what the theory is saying. Get more into that a little bit later. James, how much time do I have left? Thanks very much. Here are some issues. We look at life and find at least one axis of symmetry. Cells admit arguably up to three approximate axes of symmetry. They're spherical. It's a spherical symmetry. Humans have one approximate axis of symmetry. I'm sure you can find it and I don't need to tell you where it is. How does DNA slash gene-centric evolution account for this? It's unclear. Evolution appears to fall somewhat short of being a scientific model, which Dr. Stephen Wolfram has echoed the sentiment of. It appears to be a more or less a framework to organize a fossil record. I'm not sure if I want to go that far, but I will say that all systems admit multiple materialistic type solutions and given the amount of compute that were available to us in the modern day, it behooves us to perhaps investigate whether a simpler formulation may yield. God forbid, actual predictions. It's not so easy to interpret what's going on here. I mean, nobody is necessarily disagreeing that there's causal closure between these species. That's the uncontested part. That's the first step of the Socratic Shovel. The other step is, well, we got from here through a bunch of mutations that were random and this is how they happen and such and such and such. You get a situation where there's a bit of a cart horse in terms of presumptions and testing them. What do we have evidence of? That which I've called devolution, which got me in trouble. I've tried to steer clear from the D word in this presentation. What I wanted to focus on was that can we go back from broccoli to brassica? No, because it's been domain adapted. It's become selected for stems and flowers. It's now moved into that space. It's lost some potential. Very unclear how to account for that and generally how the information all shakes out. We're talking not really in plants, but in animals. We're talking about accounting for tremendous leaps in intelligence with one step in chromosome. Well, it goes from 46 to 48 in chromosome length. That's not the only thing that would necessarily predict it. But if we want to look at what would actually predict vis-a-vis this model, if it was indeed making predictions, we could investigate genome sizes, try to find a correlation. Well, the mouse and the dog and the human all being approximately the same throws a wrench in the works in terms of how predictive any type of interpretation that way in that direction is going to become. And we can look at chromosomal lengths, which appears to be more correlated, but it's really unclear to me and I'm hoping Psy or anybody can help me understand a little bit better. What exactly we're expected to believe happened in the process? Did the extra chromosomes just fall off one day? Anyway, I would just really like to know how we might start to explore some of these questions and I appreciate the chance to be here today to pose these questions. You got it. Thank you very much, Jen for that opening statement. And I want to let you know, folks, if you have not heard, we are absolutely thrilled this coming Saturday. Modern day debate, debate con is happening. My dear friends, this is going to be huge. I've got to just quick plug this. You can see this on our main page on the YouTube channel here, where you can see in the top row, those are our religion debates for Saturday the 15th. And then on Sunday the 15th, we have the specifically political debates. It's going to be amazing. You don't want to miss it. Tickets are on sale right now. And remember, it starts this Saturday in Dallas, Texas. For both days, it'll be in Dallas, Texas. You can get tickets at the link in the description box. You don't want to miss it, folks. We're going to jump into size opening statement and then Jen, just if you're able, your screen share is still on. I'm not able to stop it on my side, but we're going to jump into size opening statement as we're absolutely thrilled to have our guests here. And Si, thanks so much for being with us. The floor is all yours for your opening statement. Thank you, James. And thank you, Jen, for that opening. Let me just say I'm very happy to be here. Some of the older folks in the chat may remember me from a few years ago when I was on Modern Day Debate a lot. I think one of the episodes where I was debating Ken Hovind about evolution, that goes back a few years. What I want to do in my opening statement is talk about where I am with respect to evolution and biology in general. And it's not in a position that can be easily characterized. Officially, I call myself an evolutionary creationist, which means that I do hold evolution as the mechanism for the diversity of life. I distinguish that from the origin of life, which cannot be explained by biological evolution, which I won't get into today, but that's to me very clear. And I also don't think that evolution fully explains human characteristics of many kinds other than physical appearance. So to start out, I'd actually like to just very quickly talk a little bit about some interesting historical aspects of biology. Originally, biology was not considered to be a science, and I'm talking about 200 years ago or so. It was considered metaphysical, not physical, because nobody could get a handle on doing science on living organisms. One of the key points of biology originally was the idea of vitalism. And vitalism held that there is a vital force which permeates all of living things, including all the chemicals within living organisms. So the idea was that, and that's where the word organic chemistry came from, it was assumed that chemicals made out of carbon were basically coming from life, and they had some special force that was not found anywhere else. And that was disproved in the 1820s by a German chemist named Waller, who synthesized a very simple chemical compound from life called urea. It's found in urine of all mammals. And when he was able to make urea in the laboratory, it was a shock. And it kind of was the beginning of the end for vitalism because it sounded like, well, maybe life is not so special. It doesn't have a special force, it's just chemistry. And of course, that turned out to gain momentum. People began isolating other molecules in living cells that were chemicals. And eventually, by the 1930s, vitalism was dead, and there was a new field called biochemistry, which is also where I have my PhD, and I studied biochemistry for many decades in various ways. And what happened was a kind of a throwing the baby out with a bathwater kind of thing, or a very strong reaction against vitalism. So the idea was that not only is vitalism wrong, but biology is chemistry. In other words, it's a highly reductionist view that then began to permeate all aspects of biology, molecular biology, biochemistry. Everything can be explained through chemical principles. And that, I mean, I skipped over revolution somewhere in there, because Darwin came along with his theories, which were very nice, but they were not terribly grounded, and I agree with Jen on this, in what we consider standard scientific basis. And the reason for that is that, I agree with that because evolution was not ever and still is not really a mathematical theory that can be described by any kind of mathematical laws, which is what we're used to in physics and chemistry. And I think there are many reasons for that. And one of the reasons for that is that in fact, even though vitalism is not true, there is something about biology, about living cells, about living systems that is not simply very complex chemistry. There's something else. And this is one of the reasons I really wanted to speak with Jen and hear her views, because I know she has some thoughts on this. Now, one of the things that I think is very important to know is that evolution is not a static fixed kind of theory, like most good scientific theories. I think Darwinism is correct. It works to an extent, but it's not complete. It's not a complete scientific theory. It doesn't explain biology the way, for example, Newton's laws explain motion. And of course, Newton's laws were not replaced by Einstein's laws. Those laws completed the theory of gravity, the theory of motion, and brought them to a point where we now can say we have a complete theory of gravity. We do not have a complete theory of biology or even a complete theory of evolution. And the reason for that is that there are some real gaps. And I think Jen has already listed some of them on her slides. There are a lot of things we don't understand. And one of them, which I was going to bring up anyway, is this question of gene number. I remember when the Human Genome Project was first coming up with a number of genes in humans, everybody thought it would be 30 to, well, actually 50 to 100,000 genes because after all, we're very complex. It turned out we have a lot fewer genes than mice, than rice, the plant, and then a lot of other creatures. And that simply doesn't make any sense unless you accept the premise that Jen already pointed out, which is that it's not simply the DNA in the genes, which code for proteins. We know that's true, but that's not enough. It's not enough to explain human biology. How could it be that we only have 20,000 genes and yet we have so much more complexity than a mouse or a rice plant? And the answer is that it's more than just the number of genes that you have. It's how they're regulated. And it's not only just the genes. And I also agree, by the way, with Jen's negative view of gene determinism and gene centrism. And I'm not alone. Dennis Noble, who's a very, very famous physiologist in Great Britain, has written many papers attacking the whole concept of the selfish gene, that the genes determine everything, genetic determinism is all there is. And there's a lot, I can't go into the details, of course, but there's a lot of very good scientific reasons to dispute that concept. So where does that leave us? It leaves us at a point where we are looking for ways to go forward. We're not quite sure what to do. Research into the origin of life has become stalled. It does not look like it's going to be a simple matter of chemistry. It certainly can't involve evolution, as I said before, because you need life to have evolution, so you can't get evolution to start life. Chemical evolution is not going to cut it. And we're at an impasse. And what we need to do is to look for new ideas, new models, and I would say borrowing some things from other fields, such as physics, and perhaps even metaphysics, to look at things that we've rejected in biology, like the concept of teleology, of agency, and other things. And I don't have an answer for that. But I think that we need to be very open and not argue that evolution is true or false. It's clear that evolution happens. But to say, okay, we know what evolution can do, but now we have to go further and deal with the parts that it cannot do and find new ways to approach those questions. And I think that that's probably where I would stop, unless I have a lot more time, but I don't think I do. You got it. Thank you very much, Sai, for that opening statement. And thrilled to let you know, folks, we have many more juicy debates like this coming up in the future. So don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. And with that, Dr. Sai as well as Jen, we are thrilled to have you and excited for this open discussion. The floor is all yours. Okay. You want to start? Well, I had a couple of thoughts based on what you said. And it seems like we agree on some points. So since it's a debate, maybe we should start with what we don't agree on. Fine. So a few things I was thinking about was maybe you could start by telling me a little bit about your published research about fractals and DNA shape because that sounds absolutely fascinating. That's actually my favorite paper and it's not considered my best. I remember one time. Maybe it just needs more time. Did you know that? Boltzmann was very unpopular at the time of this series. They're very, very popular, even still today. Yeah. It's very funny. Okay. So I worked, my research career was in environmental toxicology and environmental carcinogenesis. And from that, I got into DNA genetics and population genetics and lots of different areas. And published a lot of papers, joined a lot of research groups doing various work in that. But in my soul, I was always fascinated by theoretical biology. I always felt that theory is missing in biology. Biology is mostly description. And that's why I started as a biology major in college and I switched to chemistry because I was just learning that this is called this and that's called that and this is big and that's small and this is round. Chemistry seemed to me like a real science and I loved it.  So I became, I studied that in graduate school. But the fact is I always felt that biology needs theory and it doesn't have any. And I've actually heard very famous biologists say publicly that theory is unimportant in biology. We don't need it. And I find that disturbing. So I was fascinated by fractals just as an amateur reading about mantle broad and canter sets and all that stuff. And I decided to try and see what DNA looks like because I knew that DNA was very weird in terms of the spacing of introns and exons. And lo and behold, I found out that it had a fractal structure and other people confirmed that with later publications. But nobody was really interested. In fact, that paper was rejected two or three times with comments like, who cares? What is this going to do for human health and welfare? And I don't know. Anyway, so that's why I wrote that paper. And I'm now retired after I left academic research after 30 years. I took a job at the NIH for about six years where I was an administrator. Then I retired. And once I retired, I began really doing theoretical biology, which is my first love. And I published what three papers, four papers since I retired and in theoretical biology related to things like self replication and agency, for example, and bacteria. It turns out bacteria are able, when they go into stress, for example, if they're starving or if they or if they're supposed to a toxic agent like an antibiotic, they are able to go into a hyper mutation state. And the result of that is they get to survive. And I think that's fantastic. I love that. And that's been done experimentally. I didn't invent that. But what I did do just recently, I'm still working on it, hasn't been published yet. I came up with a theoretical formulation for how that could work. And I just enjoy it. That's what I like to do. So that's a long answer to your question, Jen, but I think it deserved it. Yeah, I appreciate that. So do you think maybe just go back to your publication that was somewhat ignored with the fractals? Do you think maybe it's because it hints at a type of metaphysical answer? Absolutely. There's a little bit of inertia with regards to changing current entrenched views on those types of things. You think? A little bit of inertia, that's a very polite way of saying it. I worked at the NIH for the grant review branch. And I'm very well aware of the problem of, how you call it, not rocking the boat and being very careful about new ideas and innovation in biology and in science. It's not completely bad. There are some good reasons that one has to be careful that way. But it's probably true that we do err a little bit on the side of too much on the side of preventing innovation. So yeah, definitely that was the reason. And the best journals won't publish papers like that. They're looking for innovative papers, but they have to be very careful that they follow other things that have been published. So if you come out with something brand new, it's very hard to get that published. And that's true for, I mean, my stuff is minor, but even very good stuff that's completely brand new has a hard time getting published in the good journals at first. Once it gets established, then of course, you know, off to the races. So yeah, that prejudice does exist in the academic community. Are you familiar with any research that has indicated some type of quantum origin to life? Okay, not quantum origin, but this doesn't, well, it might relate to what you're saying. I don't know. Photosynthesis, when I was a graduate student, photosynthesis was not even understood yet. And it turns out that photosynthesis relies on quantum physics because the efficiency of energy conversion by photosynthesis is extremely high, much higher than it seems possible. And the reason very likely is that electrons are actually going through the quantum tunneling process of going down the electron transport chain several times simultaneously and then choosing the best one, which sounds like science fiction, but it's actually quantum theory. And that's, I think the first time that quantum tunneling of that type has been found in a macro environment, namely in chlorophyll and in green plants. So quantum physics has been established there. It's been suggested as the basis for mutation, which I don't know much about, but I have not heard of it as an explanation for the origin of life. And in that case, I think it's a very welcome idea because there are really no even viable hypotheses for the origin of life at this point. And whenever I say that, I get a lot of pushback from people who say, well, so and so has shown RNA consult replicate. Actually, that's not true. Usually talking about Jerry Joyce, and he hasn't done that. And the other, he and the other leaders in the field are open about admitting that the chemical evolution approach is not is not getting anywhere right now. And they get well trying to figure out what to do next. So yeah, so quantum, I know you have these ideas, I don't really understand them. And maybe you could elaborate a bit because I'd love to hear about specifically in terms of general giving chances to talk just in terms of how it potentially is a challenged evolution, especially for those who have not heard this argument before. Thanks. All right. So there is a lot that I could talk about right now. And I really don't want to bore people. And if you have a look in the chat, you see it's a lot of buzzwords. So falsification. Well, what exactly does that mean? Well, it means that we could find something. Sorry. Yeah, now we can hear you better. Go ahead. Sorry. My microphone is like it was up before. And I'm not sure if I bring it down. I think you're good. There's a bit of a clicking, but it's not a big deal. Clicking. Oh, my gosh. Clicking noise, but not a big deal. I think it's gone away. I actually googled this before the show where you talk about this idea of falsification, which is size. Well, can we prove something false? In other words, can we test it and establish that what it predicts is accurate? In other words, if it predicts that A is going to happen and B happened, well, A is not equal to B when it hadn't falsified it. So we've got a bunch of different things here listed on Wikipedia and objections to evolution. And so if there was no change over time in the fossil record, evolution would not happen. So I guess that means that any living fossil is not evolving anymore. Very unclear what this means. And I don't think that we can lay the feet of any individual biologists, chemists, physicists, anyone. I mean, everyone's trying, but it's largely a joint effort. And the way people get sequestered in school to work solo on a PhD is sort of allows for a certain type of very deep inquiry, but then the breadth suffers. And in order to get a viable scientific theory was meant in the spirit of science, we need a combination, we need a balance between both. So I'm presenting and I know that nobody wants to hear this, a mind centric model. Think of it from an intuitive standpoint, and you're meditating and thinking about the nature of reality and well, what's first? I mean, it sounds a bit like solipsism, but that is just one step of the reasoning process. Your own subjectivity, your own mind is the ultimate judge of everything that you know, it is the ground of what you know. And so it is analogizing that to the universe. Does that work as a grand unified model? Yes. Do we need to use that directly as the model? No, but you're going to have an ex-nello problem when you're creating life from non-life. If you don't accept a panpsychic view, which is basically what a mind centric model is. So the reason we design these kinds of models isn't because we literally think this is what's happened, but because we've reasoned what is possible to be existing in the absence of other things, aka the ground of being, knowing, etc. and what properties it has. Anthropomorphize those properties in a way that can be remembered easily. All that to say, you get a way to access, I'll show a diagram here because I think it really makes the point, integral information. Information that is irreducibly complex. So from this one basic shape in the middle, which is topologically simple. Now topology is not simple, but topologically this is just the complement of the third least complex knot. And it distorted, gives us a sort of skeleton. If you think of it as the Russian dolls, it's the central doll, then everything else is layered on top of it. And the way this works in with DNA is that this is an information centralizer. So you can see how it pervades the mushroom on the left and it pervades the apple on the right. And that's the thing that sends the information. It's super fluid is what allows for the information, because basically what's happening on life is that it's Le Chatelier's principle. Life is minimizing the effect of the environment on itself. So there's constantly photons coming in in the environment. And life is saying, Hey, just hang on, I'm going to make a little bit of shade. I'm going to digest that energy. And we're going to recombine it in a way that minimizes the effect of the sun on the atmosphere. Sorry if that was a little bit long winded. And I hope that was in some way insightful. The model is not completely developed, but I hope that in the long run, it will be a template for understanding biology, as well as physics and other domains. Are you familiar with Jeremy England's work on energy dissipation, heat dissipation, and the origin of life? No, but it sounds fascinating because I think in a lot of these, in a lot of these problems, we have to take a thermodynamic. Oh, I'm so sorry that my camera's turned off here. We have to take a thermodynamic lens. And this is where all the research that people have done in the past is still going to come in handy because we don't have to throw it all away. Multiple things could be true at once. And I think that's just part of so confusing about evolution and the genetic sense is that it is true in some sense. It's just not the first thing in the chain of causes that have ultimately results in the integral person that includes body and mind. Yeah, well, I don't really understand it. My physics is not very good, but it's not very difficult, actually. And I think I'm on the verge of understanding it. I'm sure you'll get it right away. But he talks about a similar thing to what you said. He talks about life being the entity that can deal with the enormous amount of energy flux onto the earth and dissipate the heat through chemical reactions that are, I guess, mostly endergonic. And that leads to metabolic cycles, which is part of what life is. And it's interesting. I mean, it's gotten a lot of attention from physicists and a few biologists as well. And so it's something you may want to look into. Yeah, his last name is England and it's easy to find. I don't really understand. I mean, the thing about panpsychism, I find that very interesting. I don't know enough about how... Okay, let me back up a little. What I like about observers is that that's a real thing in physics, as you know. The observer effect is certainly real. And it raises the question of if things collapse to their final quantum state, once they're observed, it raises the question of who's doing the observing. Now, of course, we observe through instruments, but what happened before? There were humans who was observing things. And I don't know the answer to that. Do you have any thoughts on that? I mean, with panpsychism, you could say, well, everything has got some ability to observe. So as soon as you have matter, you have observers. Is that correct? I suppose you could call that the trivial justification of panpsychism. I do hear it frequently. I don't know that it's particularly compelling because it just sort of seems like wallpapering over an otherwise complicated problem of a biogenesis, if that is indeed what's happening. So I'd say it's more or less a mystical position that there's no reason to expect... There's actually every reason to expect you that there wouldn't be much intuition on such a metaphysical primitive notion as consciousness. So the question is, how do we use something that we don't yet know how to visualize from prior experience, knowing that these things only come along after a lot of practice? And we don't have any practice because we don't know what practice entails. Given that, how do we use... It's kind of like, how do we use infinity and calculus? We need to know what infinity is before we get there. So I would say, yes, there's a mystical... There's a very abstract, confusing side that people can get lost in for a long time, but if you just want to understand it in the same way we understand science now, consciousness is waveform or wave function or whatever it is we're calling the quantum system. It's some sort of reduction in that, but there's an amplification elsewhere. So it's not just constantly going down, down, down, down, down. It's a conservation of a surface area. So it's compressed in one place and expanded elsewhere. That's all we're really trying to say. The question to ask is, what is it that the universe is conscious of? So if someone's at Pan's Lake, it's cool. I say, well, what is the object of consciousness? If the universe is conscious, what does it know? And if they can't tell you well, then they're just using it as a buzzword. But I'll tell you, the universe does actually know something, and you could say it explicitly, and that's that it exists in a three plus one dimensional causality. And that's something we can know one aspect of on our scale. And we could say, I have access to three physical dimensions in one temporal dimension. And that truth transcends all the dimensions and adds more information each time it's instantiated. So that's what Pan's psychism actually entails, is that observation is just going from three plus one into three plus one between systems. So I don't know if that's too abstract, but the thing that is conscious is everything. And the thing that is known by the consciousness is dimensionality. So that is hard to refute, right? Because it's like, well, yeah, I guess I live in three plus one dimensional causality.  We have to take that abstract basic fact and then extrapolate it to a model that actually we can actually start to get a handle on geometrically. And that's why I'm doing all these conversations with people now to see where they're at, so that I can make a model that they'll understand. And that's why I really appreciate these conversations. And I apologize if this is turning out to not be enough of a debate. Oh, no, I knew it was not going to be a debate. It's so helpful to me to just do what your thoughts are. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, let me just say that. I mean, you know, the last time I was on modern day debate, James remind me, I think I was talking with Ruland Downard, right? James Downard. I think that's right. Yeah. Yeah. And we ended up agreeing on everything. And the audience was not happy because I think I have that tendency to do that. So I'm sorry to the audience. Dumps to fires are not my thing, although I've had a couple of those too. It's good organic. It's natural. It's authentic. So wherever it goes, it's good. Yeah, I think that I mean, it's interesting because my own, okay, so I have to say that some people in the audience will know. The other thing about me is that I'm a Christian. I became Christian later in life. I was raised as an atheist, a very militant atheist, and I became a Christian later on. And it didn't really change much of my scientific worldview at all. I always was, you know, accepting evolution. And of course, I still do. And I accept mainstream science in general. However, what it did do is kind of poke me into acknowledging that we may be making a mistake when we use pure rational materialism or philosophical materialism for sure. And also, you know, methodological materialism when we do science. And the reason I say that is because if we look at the history of science again, you know, and you'll appreciate this. Physics was stuck in the 19th century. I mean, they really weren't going very far anywhere. And the mystery of light was just going to be a mystery that no one would ever solve. And how did they get out of that? They got out of that. They, meaning Einstein and Max Planck, you know, around the same time or a little later, they got out of it by changing their methodology, by changing their parameters, their basic concepts, even their axioms, so that things like, you know, time speeding up and slowing down, which was considered science fiction before that became reality. And the same thing with the observer effect and quantum, you know, all the things in quantum theory that are very strange. And it's all science. So in other words, the goalpost of what science and what's mysticism was moved to the left so that, you know, what used to be mystical now became scientific. And that hasn't happened in biology at all. Biologists represent the largest number of atheists among all scientists. They are the most materialistic. And I and they will fiercely reject any hint of mysticism or anything other than strict materialistic ways of approaching things. Now, I would say that in 95% of the time, that's true. Okay, we we learn a lot about biology using standard method methodological scientific methodologies and epistemologies. It's true. That works. But it does. It's not enough. And and I think we're at the point now where physics was in 1904, you know, we're stuck. And without without, you know, necessarily having to be Christian or mystical or whatever, the fact is biology is stuck and we need new approaches. I don't know if any of them that are coming up with including your ideas on panpsychism or some other things that I've heard you talk about, I don't know if they're right. I don't know if my idea I mean, I think that we need to bring back teleology into biology, we need to have Let's talk about that for a little bit. What do you mean when you say teleology? Okay, so teleology is something that's kind of foreign in chemistry or physics. If two atoms, you know, if two molecules bump into each other, they may or may not react depending on physical forces. We know that no molecule says to itself, or maybe they do, but I hope at least we don't admit that a molecule says, gee, I'm looking for a friend. Let's see, can I go over there and find one? And they go over there. But in biology, that happens all the time. In fact, every organism we know of has agency. It decides what to do. Now it may decide it. It decides it completely unconsciously in the case of single cell organisms, but they do make decisions and they do get together and they act as a group and they have purposes and goals and they fulfill those purposes. Now the ultimate purpose may be just survival and that's where evolution comes in. Evolution takes advantage of that as the ultimate purpose by positing that anything that helps survival is what will occur because that's who survives. A little bit of a circular argument, but it works. But I don't think it's trivial. I think that if we ignore teleology and again, I'm not alone. A lot of biologists are now saying this. If we completely ignore teleology, we're just dropping an entire category of behavior and of action of organisms on themselves, on others, on the environment, we're just throwing it out. And I think that may be a mistake. Now I don't have an answer for how that would work, but I think that at least we should consider possible answers that involve teleological thinking and also agency thinking. In other words, the idea of determinism that everything that happens can be traced to physical and chemical causes, including things like human emotions and including things like technology, everything, that all of that can be simply traced down to the biochemistry of neurology or whatever. I think that's not working. It's not true. I think it shows that it's not true. And this probably applies to every aspect of biology. And again, I don't have an answer the way I don't have a model like you do. There's two definitions for teleology. I just want to make sure the audience could follow. This is not a term I'm very familiar with in philosophy. It means the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than the cause by which they arise. But there's also a theological definition, which was that I assume you're using, which is the doctrine of design and purpose in the material world? No, the first one. I didn't know the second one. Okay, so a purpose-centered explanation and you're arguing that at present we don't have all the purposes justified in view of biology and we ought to be able to. I think so. And I don't know how to do that. In other words, I don't know how you get purpose back into biology. It's been so excluded for so long. On the other hand, it's impossible to avoid because even in our textbooks we say the function of this enzyme is to catalyze that reaction. But when you say the function of an enzyme, you're saying what it does, but you're also saying what its purpose is. And that's important because the reason the enzyme is made is because there's a regulatory signal that goes to the DNA, which then turns on a gene that makes that protein. And it makes that protein because there's been another signal which says, hey, we need more of this protein because that's the enzyme that catalyzes the reaction that we need to live. So make the protein, please. You can't avoid teleology when you talk about biological mechanisms. It just makes no sense. Now, what strict evolutionists will say is sure. And that's all been, that's all evolved to do that. So when we're not eating for a while, we feel hungry because hunger is something that stimulates us to eat. Otherwise, we wouldn't eat and we would die of starvation. That's we meaning all animals. And all animals get hungry when they don't, when they haven't eaten for a while. And that pain is very, it's critical to life. We didn't feel hungry. Who wouldn't eat? Why bother putting something in your mouth? It doesn't make any sense. Maybe a lot of these problems reduce to a failure to go from the micro to the macro in a coherent way because we've had so much success breaking things down chemically and so much success advancing technologically. So we've kind of got the extremes covered, but then in the middle. Oh, and I see a lot of people are taking issue with teleology, but maybe if we could devistify it just a little bit, I would say we want to start with something uncontroversial. Then we can move it to things like more abstract that you dissociate with religion, like beating, purpose, destiny, et cetera, et cetera. Because for simple systems, it's clear that these more complex concepts maybe exist, maybe they don't, but might be anthropomorphism. But if we start with something really straightforward, which is just the original intentionality of the moderate approach to science, it's simplest presumptions, usually geometry type presumptions that make the predictions. For example, gravity, the Newtonian model is really simple. Mass is proportional to gravity, and that's awesome. That's actually very insightful. To me, that's good science. Does it have to be transcendent telling us everything about everything? No, it's great because it doesn't do that. It's great because you don't have to be a mystic to understand it. It's just what it is. But at some point, we have to correct incorrect assumptions about metaphysics where society starts to degenerate. I've got my model here with light, and it's funny because the self-similarity that you researched in DNA seems to line up with this as well, and how do we get the shape of DNA from a priori spheres? We just start with spheres and just assume that they're vibrating against each other, and then from that, you can derive a DNA shape. That's a geometric argument as to the overall geometry of DNA, starting from something simpler. A lot of people take issue with this, but to me, this is going in the direction that we need to go, and it's not a full answer, but it's a start to say, well, you can see how it's connected all together. You can see how the light is spinning at it. It can go in one way, but it can also go in the other way. It has access to the entire chain, and then the chain abides by other principles as well. Multiple things can be throughout once. The self-similarity is another one. Why is that true? Well, maybe it's some type of requirement that the universe minimize energy, and this minimizing energy principle just keeps coming up over and over. I think pretty soon we'll get a little closer, but can you start to see what a better model might look like and how it might incorporate some elements of physics? But I don't really even think physics is looking at it this way, because it actually took a biological physics course in university. My professor was, he was a lot like you. He was passionate about the topic, but there's not much to work off, because the physicists are kind of like just not quite bridging the gap. I guess I think computers keep bridging the gap, but I'm very optimistic. I think maybe the AI people have the whole not understanding what it is that their technology applies to per se. They might have that in common. Maybe they should team up. Yeah. I mean, I would just like to say, I just like to say, first of all, I don't look at the chat while I'm on. I can't do that. I'm one of those people who's easily distracted, so I never really read the chat while I'm talking, but I'm not surprised that there is pushback and resistance to what I'm saying about teleology. It's way out of the standard paradigm for biological science right now. I admit that, and I don't care because I'm retired and I can't be fired. I can say whatever I want, and I thank James for inviting me here to do this. I've been doing it for, since I retired, I've been doing it for several years, and I may be completely wrong, and I think you probably admit the same thing. When anybody comes up with a new idea, I think has to take into account the possibility that they might just be guessing or whatever, just blowing ideas out there that are going to get shot down. That's happened to me several times during my scientific career. I published things which were later refuted by other people. It didn't hurt me. I'm still alive. I mean, these things happen, but I think if we restrain ourselves, and I think you'll agree with this, Jen, if we as scientists restrain ourselves to only thinking and talking about things that we know our colleagues will absolutely agree with, that's not the way we get anywhere. It is a good way to publish papers and get grants, but as I said, I'm done with that. I don't need to do that anymore. It's not a big issue for me. I think there are many ideas circulating around by people who are still professionals in the field. I mentioned Dennis Noble, James Shapiro, these people have published papers, all the people involved in the extended evolutionary synthesis, looking at things like stress-directed mutations. Another name is Susan Rosenberg, who's been doing this. These are professional scientists who are publishing good peer-reviewed papers. It's probably a mistake to assume that you know that somebody is saying something that's far out, unless you're really pretty sure of it and you have the credentials to say that. If you don't, I think the best thing is to say, well, that's interesting. I don't really agree that I understand it, but it might be true. That has certainly happened a lot in the past. We've had a lot of big breakthroughs in the past by people saying, this sounds weird, but it may be true. We won't know. I probably won't find out, but why not talk about it and think about it? Not every idea is going to work, of course. Many of them won't, but I think it's worth exploring. I'm still trying to understand both your model and Jeremy England's physics model and his is complete with equations and looks to be very solid.  I think you'll probably make more sense out of it. And one thing that is very important to do in science has always been true in every field of science is to collaborate with people who don't know anything about what you know, but know everything about what they know and see if you can find ways that you help each other. I mean, Watson and Crick is a great example. Crick was a physicist. Watson was a biologist and they ended up integrating their ideas beautifully for a great result. And I would just love to see a resurgence of that, wouldn't you? I would. I would. I think openness and diversity of thought is something we desperately need in all areas, not just science, but certainly in science. Yeah, I would love to see a resurgence of that. And I think we're going to, I think we will because we have no choice. We're not going anywhere this way. We're really not. And we have to do something. So it'll work. It's evolution. That's what evolution says. Whatever works survives.  You got it. Is it about time for that? Yep. Great. Well, this debate was extremely friendly. And I appreciate that. And overall, I think the education level was a lot higher than some of the other ones. I think there is a place for these types of friendly debates. Evolution, biology, understanding exactly how, I think it sounds so simple, right? Light creates life. I mean, how could anyone even disagree with that? Even the chemists will agree that photons mediate transitions of matter. But then to take that next step to, well, you know, so what? Okay, now we're going to justify a model. What does it mean for a model to be good? Does it matter if it's super accurate, always dead on? If nobody can understand it, what's the utility of that, even if it can be demonstrated to exist beyond a shadow of a doubt? So I'll continue to work to make my theories more accessible for whatever applications seem like the most opportune at the time. And I hope people will continue in the chat and in the conversation on the streams to give me the feedback that I need to make these theories as understandable to the widest range of people as possible, because that's my main goal. Helping as many people as I can who might be interested in a better life through an intellectual serious type pursuit. I would like to give complete answers that people can just turn around and apply right away and exclude me completely from all of the goings on. But that's just not how it works with these deeper, more mystical subjects. It takes time to get familiar with how to apply them. There's a trade-off. The more specific, the easier to understand, but also the less general. So please keep that in mind and be patient with yourselves when you're getting into these new ideas. We're not denying materialism. We're just saying maybe there's something else. And if there is, what's the best way to understand it? Don't want to shut down a question before we've even posed it. And with that, I'll say thank you again to James for hosting, and especially Dr. Sai Gart. Thank you so much for being willing to come on the show and talk to me about your work and your opinion. You got it. And Sai, unless you'd like a quick closing, we can go into the Q&A. But that's up to you. Oh, go ahead. I think I gave my closing. Yeah. You got it. And we're going to jump right into it. Want to say, folks, a couple of things. Our guests are linked in the description. So if you want to hear more from Dr. Gart or from Jen, all you have to do is click on the description box. And that includes if you're listening via podcast as modern day debate is on podcast. I got to tell you folks. So if you're looking at your phone right now, you can find modern day debate on your favorite podcast app. And Jen and Dr. Gart are linked in the description box for this debate episode. Next, jumping into the Q&A. Thanks so much. You to have heck you says to Dr. Gart, if evolution is true, why can't we pass universal healthcare in America? It happens every time. This one from Mr. Monster says humans are in the family of ape. I'm not sure who that's for. Well, yeah. So next up, you'd have a cue says Dr. Gart and Jen. At what point in the universe's history do you think observable facts fail and metaphysics take over? Well, gee, why don't you ask me a hard question?  Infinity is kind of on the verge of being not quite a metaphysical primitive, but anytime where the meaning of a term is not uncontroversial, it's going to require a different perspective of analysis. Yeah, I would just say there was a time in my life when I was very interested in consciousness, and I remember doing a lot of reading, and I was shocked to find that there was no definition of consciousness. And in fact, there is no definition, scientific definition of consciousness to the point where, you know, very famous people like Daniel Dennett have said it's an illusion and there's no such thing. And how do you prove that there's no such thing as consciousness? Well, just, you know, that basically is echoing what Jen said. We don't even know what it is, so that's a good place to say, well, maybe it's metaphysical, because if we can't even define it, if we can't even describe it, and we can't, I feel like on me, that's consciousness, that's useless, that doesn't say that was anything. So it's got to be metaphysical because we just have no clue. And we don't know how it evolves. Speaking of evolution, yes, humans are apes, but that tells us nothing about human or ape consciousness. We don't know anything about it. And we're not going to find out about it by evolutionary investigations. You got it. And then this one, I'm going to read this early, because I just want to be sure that I understand the question. So maybe one of you will understand it, but in case you don't, that way we can give them a chance to revise it just to be sure that I understand. They said, Elliot Pollock wanted to ask, thanks so much for your question, Elliot, said, will you please ask Jen, then they put low energy side equals standard process of how electricity slash photons take the path of least resistance. Jen, I think that one's for you. There's a lot of words that God said. I'm not sure that that's a sentence. It really didn't make sense to me. I'm sorry. I'm trying to understand it as well. Let me know whether it be Elliot or Ray the way I'll keep an eye on the chat if you want to let me know in terms of revising just to be sure that we can understand it. And then this one coming in from Mango, T says, Dr. Si, while I was abroad studying in Ethiopia, my biologist, teacher said evolution is a hoax, but the curriculum forces them to teach it. And then said, if evolution is under consideration, why is it being forcefully taught as fact in schools and classrooms? Okay. I'm not sure I get that last part. It's clear that evolution is a science is scientifically valid theory, and it certainly makes sense to teach it in classrooms. My comments were that it's not a complete theory, not that it's wrong. I don't know what teacher would say it's, what did he say, a croc or something? It's not true. There's a problem here. I don't know anyone, anyone, including Ken Hoven, who thinks that evolution isn't true, because although he claims that he thinks that, when we talk about micro evolution, he completely agrees with that. So micro evolution is bacteria undergo various forms of mutations, which accumulate over time, and eventually they are able to escape or change their phenotype. So if that, that's basically the mechanism. Now, it's not the complete mechanism for large scale evolution, because there are some things that are still, we don't know how they happen. So there may be other things as well going on. But evolution is a useful biological theory that explains a great deal of biological diversity, but not everything. There are major, major gaps in what evolutionary can explain, even in no time to go into it. So it's perfectly legitimate to teach it in school. We still teach Newtonian physics, even though general relativity has brought that further, but we can't teach general relativity in junior high school, I don't think. This one coming in from, do appreciate your question. Let's see. Ray the Way also asked, Dr. Sye, are you denying the book of Genesis by saying that God is incapable of creating life in six days? If so, I question the rest of your theology, hashtag doctrine matters. Yeah, I question. I mean, you can question my theology. I'm not a theologian. My faith is in Jesus Christ. It's not in a literal interpretation of Genesis. I don't happen to hold with the Seventh Day Adventist view, which has now become Young Earth creationism, that the earth was created 6000 years ago in five days. That's a very recent Christian theology. If you don't know that, you can look it up. There have been books written about it. You can find it anywhere online, the origin of Young Earth creationism. There's a very good video just put out by Michael Jones, the channel's inspiring philosophy. He discusses this exact point. And so you may question my theology. That's fine. I don't care. My theology is what it is, and it's held by the majority of Christians in the world. Believe it or not, that's a fact. And your theology is something I don't agree with. That's all. You got it. And you'd have, heck, Hugh says, to both, if we agree evolution happens, why can't we get universal health care in America and not rhetorical? So we'll give you a really... What does that mean? Well, the idea is that universal health care is so desirable from an evolutionary standpoint that its failure to be realized in modernity is a conclusive proof of the falsity of evolution. I think it might be a troll question. I can give an answer actually because the life force is being redirected for the interests of a body corporate, which has a positive legal duty to maximize profit. So I would start there in your inquiry if that is a genuine question. Yeah, I would just say that evolution is very slow and takes a lot of time. And I'm sure that in 500 years there'll be universal health care if we're still around. So you got it. And thank you very much for your question. This one coming in from iron charioteer long time viewer says, ask Dr. Gart please, have you ever investigated the origins of Genesis and creation in the Bible? Or do you believe Genesis was the beginning of time? I think they're saying like you think that there was something that happened before Genesis, before the Genesis narrative. Oh, oh, before in the beginning God created heaven and earth? Correct. Okay, so well, that's very interesting. It actually goes to a lot of what both of us have been saying, which is that science has to change.  But, you know, the belief was that the universe was eternal, and it was always here, steady state. And, and when the big bang theory came along, a lot of people said, well, no, that that sounds biblical, that that's not right. But it turns out it is right. Now, what's very interesting is that a lot of science, atheist scientists have been trying to claim that in not not some some scientists, but a lot of atheists who are not scientists have been trying to claim that in fact, the universe is past eternal, there was no origin of the universe. And that I think that's been disproven by the Lincoln, but I'm not not competent to discuss it tonight. It's not time. So we do have a beginning of the universe 13 point, whatever, eight billion years ago. And we don't know anything about it. Anything that happened, we can't understand anything that happened before 10 to the minus 43 seconds is called the plank time after the origin. So we can't figure out what was quote before, except to say there was no before, because the origin of the universe was also the origin of time, space, matter and energy. And so the answer is no, there was nothing before the creation of the universe or the origin of the universe. However, it began, I believe it was created by God, but that's because that's a belief that's not a scientific statement. You got it. And this one coming in from do appreciate your question. This one I'm a little bit confused about. So they say, Dr. Gart, I want to get my booster COVID shot, but evolution says my body is so prestigious, it will make a strain in parentheses pseudo 2.0. What's a Christian to do? Now I asked them in the chat if they meant, he said, they said what they mean by that is quid pro quo. So because I asked them, do they mean that their body is going to make a follow up strain of COVID or that COVID will have a follow up strain. So again, they say, I want to get my booster shot, but evolution says my body is so prestigious, it'll make a strain named 2.0. Evolution doesn't say anything like that. And I got to tell you that I made a very short video while I was at a Christian conference in August. I was at a apologetics conference where I talked about the origin of life and the organizer Cameron Brutuzzi, who I think most of you know, asked me to do a very short video to the height of the Delta wave about vaccinations for Christians. I made that video, it was four and a half minutes. I just simply said, please get vaccinated. It's going to save your life. And the reaction was so stunningly negative. They were like 45,000 views and many more dislikes and likes and lots of comments. And I decided not to talk about COVID or the vaccine. After that, I did make one more video with Cameron and another position. But all I can say is, do what you like. I got boosted. I'm vaccinated. I got boosted. Every one of my family has been boosted. Almost every one of my church has been boosted. It's up to you. Do what you want to do. I'm no longer discussing this. You got it. Thank you very much for your question. Appreciate it. This one coming in, I'm a bit confused, but you guys might have to, those of you who are in the live chat, if you want to correct me, feel free. Ray the Way says, Dr. Sye, the evolution theory came about between 1748 and 1859, aka not too long ago. The people of the Bible most likely believed in a six day creation. That's the end of the question. That's correct. Or statement. I'm not getting the point. I think they're saying that the theology prior to roughly, let's say between 1748 and 1859, when evolution was like kind of where people were starting to converge on that idea, they are saying like that was relatively recently. And so prior to that for the roughly, all right, look, folks, evolution is not atheistic evolution as says nothing about God. It's a scientific theory.  I again recommend this video very recently in inspiring philosophy that he, Michael talks about many Christian theologians at the beginning of Christianity who talked about the gap day theory and other theories that do not include a five or six day creation. So it's not true what many of you have been led to believe, which is that everyone has always believed in young earth creationism, oh, a very young earth and a six day creation that's always been true and then evolution destroyed it. False. Young earth creationism began after the theory of evolution was published in 1859 by book from books by George Price McCready and Ellen White, the founder of South of Seventh Day eventism. And those ideas then were taken up by Henry Mars and the Genesis flood in the 1960s. And that's the origin of young earth creationism. It does not go back to the Bible. Sorry. That's a fact. You got it. And thank you very much for this question. Coming in from do appreciate this. Mango T says, Dr. Si, science is not about proving something to be true, but rather it is not false that that it's not false. It appears science is the inverse of finding truth, aka satanic.  I mean, look at these. It's fine. So the first part is right. We never have proof in science. We never prove anything. What we find is things that have a lot of strong evidence and we begin to believe them and then we use them. They can always be just proven, although that doesn't happen very often, but it does occasionally. You got it. So that's, that's what science is. Why it doesn't mean it doesn't give truth. Now, if you're a Christian, as I am, I believe the truth is Jesus Christ, but that's not a scientific statement. Again, that doesn't tell us very much. It just tells us that I believe that Jesus Christ is the truth. That's all. You got it. And thank you very much for your question. This one coming in from you to have heck you says, if God is real, no, stop, shouldn't we start advocating for universal healthcare in America? Come on over 50,000 deaths a year due to no insurance. Thank you for your advocacy. Well, we're willing to read it. And this one coming in from pseudo nim. Thank you for your super sticker as well as I think this might be the last question. Mangotte says, Dr. Side, the aspects of evolution taught is how we emerge from roughly like monkeys or monkey like species. And that's it. It's a, it's like they want us to firmly believe that we came from ape like ancestors or monkey like ancestors. Again, I don't see a question there. He's making a statement. We did come from a common ancestor with modern apes. We don't know many, many ancestors. However, that that fact does not completely define humanity. I believe that, but I also believe that we were made in the image of God and the other apes were not. And what does that mean? Well, that could be translated into the fact that we, we are animalistic. I mean, we have animal features, but we also have divine features. We can do things that no other animal can do. And that doesn't come from evolution. There's no way to explain that evolutionarily.  So what? I mean, you know, what does that say about what counts about us is that we can talk to each other this way. You know, we can meet, we can do this amazing technology that allows us to meet and talk. We can make jokes. We can, we can laugh. No other animal does that. I will, I will tell you in my book, which you can find about if you look at, if you look at the link that's in the description, that's my website. And the first page on my website, you'll see my book. And in that, I talk about, I have this whole section about no other animal can do all the things that we do. And that's what makes us human. The evolutionary part of it to me is trivial. So what? What does that matter? What matters is what we got from the Lord, who gave us the image of God. And all you could just say it another way. If you're not Christian, you can say what counts is our incredible capacity to love, to be creative, to do art and music, to sing. These things are not of evolutionary origin. They're, they're, you know, they're a gift that we have. And that's what we should be celebrating. It doesn't matter whether we came from, you know, monkeys or dinosaurs, who cares? You got it. And then it came from, can I get it? I think Jen got asked a question on where a single celled organism came from. So we will to give Jen a chance to speak. Usually it's Jen getting grueled with all the questions. We've got a lot of questions for a sigh tonight, but go ahead, Jen, on the question of where a single celled organism came from. All right. So it's as usual a bit of a complicated model. I'll look at it from multiple directions. So where could we find a cell wall? What can pre-exist a cell? Maybe go look at Mr. Fungus, but back to the DNA model. What are we looking at? Okay, these base pairs and light waveform oriented at 180 degrees to each other. Why? Because that minimizes the repulsion between them. Matters a bit complicated. It attracts itself and repels itself in a perfect suspended perpetual balance, which is always minimized. Here we get the DNA shift. So just imagine that keeps going and going and going and going and going and going and going. And we can see the super simple single celled organisms having a super long, long, long, long, long. And you can think of an evolution of n happening. Think of that as folding into itself. That's half as long, but then that information is going elsewhere, i.e. into the light waveform, which is accounting for the additional complexity in the body. So just give you a little bit of an intuition. Thanks for the question. You got it, Ann. Thank you very much for this question. Coming in from Amy Newman says after show, after the debate, for both debaters. And that is true. Amy is linked in the description with an after show after this debate. You can check that out.  Well, I can answer that very easily. My mind is continually changing on evolution. It's been changing for the last 20 years, probably. And the reason I keep changing my mind is because new data is coming in all the time. It's a very exciting field. Evolutionary biology is no longer static. The neo Darwinian view of random mutations followed by natural selection is gone. I mean, there aren't any evolutionary biologists working in the field who hold to that. There are a few academics who do. They write textbooks, but people actually doing research in the field are way past that. So there's a lot of new stuff going on. Some of it is called the extended evolutionary synthesis, but there's much more than that. There's convergence, Simon Conway Morris. If I have a paper on the extended evolutionary synthesis, which I can put in the description later, I guess, or no, you can find it on my website. So yeah, it's a very dynamic evolving, if I may, field of science. And some people are rejecting new ideas. I don't. So I'm changing my mind all the time. And it's a good question because, but I would never change my mind to say it's totally untrue because that would just discount too much scientific fact that would not be explainable. Yeah, I would change my mind if, uh, well, first of all, if a more precise model were presented to explain the evidence, predicted future configurations more accurately, or if there was something empirical, i.e., literal aliens descending from the sky saying, I guess what? We did it. It was a troll. My bad, you know, if it's right in front of my eyes, what am I going to say? Thank you. You got it. This one from Ray the Way. As mentioned, Dr. Sye, getting a lot of questions says, why doesn't the Bible talk about the cataclysmic aspect of the big bang and evolution? Don't you think God would be more specific? Yeah, that's a great question, actually, but not for now. That would be a great question on the discussion of science and faith and how concordism and, you know, how God's hidden this, all kinds of things that are theological, which you could find on Facebook. There's several good groups that talk about that. It's a complex question and I don't know the answers. As I said, I'm not a theologian at all, but there are people who do discuss this. Let me think about some books. Well, John Walton's books are very good. You can look at him. I think another person you should look up is Dennis Lamerou. The last name is as if it's French. And he's written a recent book called The Bible in Ancient Science, which talks about the fact that the Bible was written for the population that had a particular scientific view. So there's a lot of discussion. It's a huge topic and it's not really appropriate. I can't go into any further detail. You got it. This one coming in from George. I'm only reading this, George, because you are in England and I always get a kick out of it. I'm fascinated by when other people from other countries take an interest in US politics says the closest thing out of humanity to a chimp is Joe Biden. Do you guys agree? We're not talking. You got it. This one coming in from Mango Tea says DNA doesn't exist. It's a traumatic spell. Again, nothing to say. Yeah, I don't understand sometimes Mango Tea. You always keep me on my toes. Thanks for that question. Let me just check if we've got any more. We've already, have we, what time? Holy smokes. Wow, it's almost been two hours. But let me just check and see if there are any questions that had come in. Let's see. In terms of, it is true Amy is linked in the description and that's for the after show. But I have to tell you more primarily my dear friends, Dr. Sightgart and Jen are linked in the description right now. So you can click whether you're listening via YouTube or via the podcast. You can hear or read more from each of them as we really do appreciate our guests. It has been a true pleasure. Thank you so much, Dr. Sightgart as well as Jen. We have been thrilled to have you here tonight for this discussion. Thanks for having us, James. It's been great. Thank you. 100%. I will be back with a post-credits scene about you guys this Saturday and Sunday, January 15th and 16th in Dallas, Texas. The first ever modern day debate conference. DebateCon is going to be huge. It is coming. I'm going to give you guys sweet updates on it. We have a new debate as our headline debate in fact. So big news on that. So stick around and we'll be right back in just a moment. Thanks everybody for being with us. Ladies and gentlemen, absolutely thrilled. Huge thanks again to both Jen and Dr. Sightgart. That was a fun one. I always tell you folks, hey, we like it to be organic here. We are never going to because sometimes people say, oh, when you have a dumpster fire, it's just too much. It's like, hey, we let it be that way. And likewise, when it's peaceful and when it is a pleasant civil discourse like tonight, it's natural. It's not forced. That's what we like about discussions like tonight's. And that was a great, that was a quality, cordial discussion, which we really like for real. We appreciate our guests and want to say hello to you in the old live chat as we are absolutely pumped. My dear friends, first, to have you with us. Thanks for being with us. We are glad that you were here. Whether you be Christian, whether you be atheist, whether you be agnostic Muslim, you name it. We are pumped to have you. Cementrial, I see you there in the old live chat. Thanks for being with us as well as Mango Tea and Mark Reed. Good to see you. Church of Entropy already in the old live chat. Be truthful. Glad to see you as well as Eve L and DS Wright. Thanks for being here with us. Soul Sailor. Good to have you. Doves, Crows and Dragons. We are pumped that you are with us. Mongoose McQueen. Glad to see you. Jeff Soul, Crow Magnum, Jesus Garcia, and Second Horizon. Glad to have you with us. Raymond 11. Glad you are with us as well as Decepticon Soundwave, pumped that you are here. Now, my dear friends, I told you, we have big news. You guys, it is going to be huge for real. This Saturday is when it happens. It is only about five days away. We will be at DebateCon in Dallas, Texas. So, my dear friends, I've got to tell you, you don't want to miss it. The link for the tickets is in the description box right now. So, I highly encourage you, grab that link. Grab your tickets while you can, as it is going to be a huge conference. Five debates, technically six debates, seven debates per day. You get to choose which one you want to go to, because some of them are at the same time. And believe me, it is going to be massive. We are absolutely pumped for it. And what, you guys, I got to tell you, we appreciate you guys. Seriously, we really do. And we want to say thanks for making this channel as epic as that is, as it is. Thanks for supporting us. Zach Branigan, thanks so much. Be truthful. Samantriel Skobev. And thank you guys for real. I really do appreciate you. Slang, George, Bubble, nope, Bob Elvis says, I enjoy that discussion. Thanks for that positive feedback. And I got to tell you, my dear friends, we've got big stuff coming up. So, let me tell you more about this. So, in particular, I will show you this epic event coming up. So, don't worry, I'm not a ghost. You can see me on screen on the bottom right. And you can see at the top row, you can see the modern day debate, first day's debates. Namely, this is the religion day. Oh, baby. It is going to be huge. For real, this is going to be monstrous. This conference is going to start with Dr. David Wood, aka Act 17 apologetics, taking on Muslim Kenny Boomer on whether or not Muhammad's marriage to Aisha was ethical or technically whether or not it was immoral. That is going to be a lively one. For real, you guys, you don't want to miss it. Controversial, to say the least, followed by the next one. You can see their inspiring philosophy. Mike Jones will be debating holy Kool-Aid on whether or not Christianity is dangerous. Then, T-Jump and Kenny Boomer on what is best for the world, atheism or Islam. And Dr. David Wood, Act 17 apologetics against T-Jump. Now, I've got to tell you some of these. In fact, two out of four for each day of the debates, you will have to throw into the crowd fund or be a channel member or be a Patreon supporter. So, if you're a Patreon supporter or a channel member, thank you for being a supporter of this channel. You don't have to throw into the crowd fund. I've got to tell you though, if you're not, you can either join one of those or, hey, you could throw into the crowd fund or become a channel member or become a Patreon supporter. All three of those work. You would get to watch all of the debates during the conference live. Seriously, it is going to be amazing. Because, for example, the inspiring philosophy debate with holy Kool-Aid will be one that you have to throw into the crowd fund for. That crowd fund is linked in the description. And I've got to tell you, that's right below the link for the tickets and also, which by the way, the link that has the tickets also has the schedule, if you click on that link. It's for Eventbrite. That's where we're doing the ticket sales through. And then below that though is the Indiegogo link. That is the crowd fund link. Basically, let me show you, because you might be wondering, really, James, I don't know how that works exactly. What is crowd fund like? Well, let me show you. Don't worry. Here to help. In particular, you might be wondering, well, James, what is this conference exactly? DebateCon is our first ever conference. It is going to be huge. It is this coming weekend in Dallas, Texas. Grab tickets. The link is in the description. And then let me tell you more though, because you might be like, well, James, I'm not in Texas and I can't fly there. I'm kind of wanting to see it though. So tell me more, James, what exactly is going on there? Well, I'll tell you. So in particular, my dear friends, Indiegogo, which you can see the logo for on the bottom of the screen. That is how we are funding this event. Is that we are actually covering the cost of the speakers. For example, we are covering their flights as well as their hotel rooms. And my dear friends, if you throw into the Indiegogo, there are different perks that you can sign up for. One is you can ask a question from home during the debates. That's pretty huge. But not only that, because remember, these are going to be like in-person debates. They're in-person. So people like sitting maybe like six feet across from each other talking. It's going to be streamed live. And thanks so much for this laugh, just through that link into the old live chat. Thanks so much. We appreciate your help there. So that is pinned at the top of the live chat as well right now in addition to being in the description. I've got to tell you, you guys, this is going to be huge. The link for the tickets is pinned at the top of the chat and it's in the description box. And then the link for the crowdfund is right there in the old description box. But let me show you some of the other things because you might be wondering like, James, I don't know what this is exactly like. Is it hard to sign up for Indiegogo? Like, I don't know how that works. It's not hard. You can actually sign in to a speedy little sign-in just by logging in through your Facebook. How amazing is that? Super convenient. You can jump in there and throw some of the cash in there. And it's just, if you throw in nine bucks, you get to watch all of the special debates live. Those are, we have four debates over the conference that only if you throw into the crowdfund, you get to watch it live, which is awesome and as well as if you're a channel member or Patreon supporter. And it is so easy though to sign in to Indiegogo such as using your Facebook. But you might be wondering, well, what are the perks? Well, here's just a couple examples. Watch all the debates live. As I mentioned, that's one perk. And this is an updated screenshot. So we've got a lot of people have signed up for this and that fortunately is unlimited. So that we have unlimited amounts. The Q&A, ask a question during the Q&A from home during the live debate, that is actually capped. And so those are running out. But I've got to tell you, you might be thinking like, James, all right, yeah, okay, the interesting, have you ever done this before? We have. We've successfully used a crowdfund to make this debate happen in the past, almost exactly a year ago between Mike Jones and Dr. Michael Schermer. And we've also used it to make this debate happen between Matt Dillanti and Dr. Kenny Rhodes. So absolutely. And you might be wondering, well, why are you doing a crowdfund, James, though? Because you're doing a conference, but isn't it all free? Not quite. Is that for us to take this risk, we are asking you if you believe in the vision of us providing a neutral platform so that everybody can make their case on a level playing field as we strive to get people from different walks of life talking. That is our goal and vision here at Moderate Debate. And I've got to tell you, we are absolutely determined to fulfill that vision. We, however, in order to make that happen, ask for your help. This is the debate con budget. So for this conference, this debate conference, it is something that we have to invest in. In particular, you can see the blue chunk on the right. That's for the venue where the debates are held. Then speaker hotel rooms in the orange at the bottom. That's that chunk there, that little pie piece, or you could say third of the pie or so at the bottom. And then the gray is for speaker flight. So it's a lot. It's true. We really do have an absolute, it's a big budget, but we are absolutely determined. We know we can make it. We don't care if we have to put a car wash on in January. We are going to make this happen, my dear friends. It is going to be epic. And so I've got to tell you, we are pumped though. We have seen a huge amount of support come in, both through people buying in-person tickets linked in the description, as well as for this conference coming up this Saturday and Sunday, we have also seen a ton of people throw into the crowdfund. So I've got to tell you, you can see the meter on the far right of your screen. That is the amount that we've raised so far is kind of like a cushion. Just in terms of, we're kind of like, well, we don't know how many tickets are going to sell. So we'll do a crowdfund as well. And that way people can watch from home. And I've got to tell you, time is running out. You guys, the crowdfund ends on Thursday. So it ends two days before the conference starts. And so don't wait. Like throw into the crowdfund now while it's open. And that way you know that you're going to be able to watch those debates live as it's going to be epic. And you can see, like I said, at the far right of the screen, that meter you have seen a ton of people have already thrown in and backed this project. And we appreciate that. That means more than you know, my dear friends. So I want to say hi to you there. In the old live chat though, if I haven't gotten to say hi to you already, our verdict, we are glad you were here. Best in show glad you came by. And my dear friends, thanks for coming by slaying. I see you there. And our verdict says, hi, I'm new. What's going on? Our verdicts, we are glad that you were here. Thanks for being with us. We hope you feel welcome for real, whether you be atheist, whether you be Christian, you name it. We are glad to have you here as we continue to strive to fulfill the vision of providing a neutral platform so that everybody can make their case on a level playing field, discussing the big questions of life as we strive to get people from different walks of life talking. So thanks everybody for your support of the vision and of modern day debate. We are pumped for the future. We are pumped for debate con this weekend. It's coming fast, you guys. Thanks everybody. I love you. Seriously, you guys make this channel fun and join us while we are young. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button because it's true. We are absolutely pumped and thankful most of all for all of your guys' support such that we just hit 60,000 subscribers. That's super encouraging. My dear friends, but it is only the beginning. My dear friends, join us while we are small because we have big plans for the future and we are doing big things here at modern day debate. So be on a shadow of a doubt. We are pumped for the future and we want to say thank you so much for your support of modern day debate and the vision that we are pursuing here. So thanks everybody. I love you guys. Pumped, Matthew DeMartin. Good to see you there in the old live chat. I see you there who says, Hey, we are pumped as am I, my dear friend. We all are. I want to say thanks everybody. We hope you have a great rest of your night and we do have debates every night this week, Monday through Thursday. So we hope to see you tomorrow night. Everybody thanks for making this fun and I hope you have a great rest of your night.


Well, fermentation actually refers to the fact that most lower life forms like yeast and bacteria have to make energy by a process called glycolysis. And we won't take you back to high school biology. But essentially we take they take sugar molecules which are a source of carbon and through a process called glycolysis they make ATP the energy currency. Glycolysis is actually a very inefficient process for making ATP and you and I don't use glycolysis we use mitochondria and the electron transport chain but glycolysis is basically fermentation. And fermentation takes sugar and turns it into energy for the bacteria or the fungus or the mold or the yeast. And what's left over is actually what are called postbiotics. And just to review, probiotics are friendly bacteria. Prebiotics are the foods that probiotics ferment during the process of fermentation. You produce compounds that are called postbiotics. And if we had to do it all over again we wouldn't use these names but sorry about that we're stuck with it. So vinegar for instance is a product of fermentation. For that matter wine is a product of fermentation. For that matter beer is a product of fermentation. And what's fascinating is almost all ancient cultures preserved their foods or made their foods edible via the process of fermentation. So fermentation of foods have been practiced actually for past recorded history. There's evidence that the Egyptians were fermenting foods 10,000 years ago really around the time beginning of agriculture. One of the reasons we think that fermentation happened was number one there was no storage system, there wasn't refrigeration, there was no way to actually keep food fresh. And in the process of just storing food fermentation was a natural process that would start regardless of what you expected to do. What's interesting is many many many cultures actively used fermentation to make their food probably far more edible and interestingly enough as many of you know fermentation in general breaks down lectins. Believe it or not a lot of bacteria love to eat lectins they think they're delicious and they will eat the lectins for instance in quinoa. Fun fact the Incas always fermented quinoa before they ate it. They let it rot and then they cooked it. Now unfortunately that's not on the package directions. In memorial beans were always soaked for a considerable period of time and most people if they bothered to look notice that if you soak your beans foam will appear on the top of the water and that foam is actually the carbon dioxide produced by the native bacteria on beans fermenting the bean. And so traditionally beans were diminished when their lectin content because they were soaked for a considerable period of time and onward and onward. So not only does fermentation really reduce lectins but fermentation gives you postbiotics and it's the miracle of these postbiotics that I've mentioned in my last two books but now in gut check which will be out in January you really get to see how important these postbiotics that have occurred from fermentation really are. Among the main things that fermentation does one of the main postbiotics is short chain fatty acids. Now many of you have heard me talk about butyrate one of the most important short chain fatty acids there is and as you've heard about in my previous books but you're going to see even more in gut check butyrate is really the single most important short chain fatty acid for your health that you can imagine. Now we hopefully have bacteria that can make butyrate out of fiber but it gets much more complicated than that and let me give you a study that I've mentioned before and I've mentioned it in unlocking the keto code. Husband and wife team of researchers at Stanford the Sonnenbergs did a fantastic study with human volunteers that was published last year. We've known for a very long time that fiber is really good for you right and fiber is prebiotics and we've known for a very long time that our gut bacteria really really really like prebiotic fiber and the thought was that our gut bacteria can take prebiotic fiber and make all these wonderful postbiotics like butyrate and if they do this everything gets better and our immune system gets better etc etc not so fast say the Sonnenbergs. So they took human volunteers half got a lot of soluble fiber the other half got the same soluble fiber but they were given fermented foods primarily in the form of yogurt or kombucha or kefir and then they watched what happened to their gut microbiome diversity. Diversity means lots of different species and as you'll learn in gut check the more diverse your microbiome the more different members of that community the better your health and they looked at the immune system they looked at inflammation markers. Lo and behold what was shocking was the folks who got the fiber alone actually didn't improve their microbiome diversity nor did it have much effect on the immune system on inflammation but the group that got the fiber with the fermented foods had much improved gut microbiome diversity and the inflammatory markers went down. So what's up with that? Well it turns out in my research yes you want bacteria to be able to make butyrate but what's fascinating is many of the butyrate producing bacteria actually have to have precursors for butyrate to manufacture butyrate basically assembly line and so one of the shocking things is that they need for the most part other short chain fatty acids to do the conversion so they need like for instance acetic acid or propionic acid acetate or propionate to make butyrate and yeah they need the fiber but they got to have the precursors to assemble all the parts to make butyrate and that explains why it was only the group that got the fermented foods that had these short chain fatty acids that then when they got the fiber they can complete in the manufacturing process. It's also amazing in my studies of the longest living cultures of the world that almost all of these cultures have fermented foods in their diet and some of them might surprise you. So let's set the record straight on no-go fermented foods. Yogurt. Now yogurt is a fermented food. The problem with American yogurt in general is that most of our cows make a protein called casein A1 which by itself can be a lectin-like compound a very inflammatory compound. Now cows in France and Italy goats and sheep and water buffalo have casein A2 so what I want you to do is try to avoid American cow milk yogurt. There's plenty of goat yogurt available, there's sheep yogurt available, there's coconut yogurt available, there's even peely nut yogurt available called lava. All of these are great options. The other problem with most yogurts in America is they are loaded with sugar so you've got to be a wise consumer and actually look for the amount of added sugar to the yogurt. So look for the unsweetened variety and if you want them sweeter just put some allulose in and good news allulose is a prebiotic sweetener that feeds good gut bacteria. Now the second non-starter is most kombucha. Now don't get me wrong, kombucha is a phenomenal fermented food that has great postbiotics but kombucha is tangy and Americans in general don't like tangy things so companies put a whole lot of sugar in so many of the popular kombuchas to cover up that tanginess. So please read the label carefully. There are a number of popular kombuchas that have as much sugar as a soda and that's not what you're looking for. Also remember that sugar isn't going to benefit your good bacteria at all and it will only feed bad bacteria and yeast that you really don't want. On the other hand there are some kombuchas that are low sugar and they are available but you got to read the label and just be careful of the amount of added sugar in these products. Now sourdough bread years ago when the plant paradox came out I was invited on the Dr. Haas show with one proviso. Dr. Haas who's a friend of mine said you're going to have to give me a bread that people can eat otherwise I'm not having you on the show. True story. So I said well there is no safe bread but if you're going to eat bread then sourdough bread would be the safest because it is a fermented bread. We have to realize that almost all breads traditionally were raised or given heft by the addition of yeast and the yeast fermented the sugars and also the lectins in bread and that produced a even loaf. The Egyptians are the first credited with doing this. On the other hand almost all commercial breads in the United States no longer use yeast to make the bread rise. It's too inefficient and it's too unpredictable that's why you get big holes and little holes. You want even holes and that's not with yeast so modern American bread doesn't use yeast to raise the bread. Now traditionally sourdough bread is made with a sourdough starter which uses these yeast and bacteria but most sourdough bread in the United States it says sourdough because they use sourdough but most of the bread was still unfermented. So buyer beware sourdough bread in the United States for the most part is not what you're looking for. Okay so let's get to the good stuff because there's some easy to use good stuff. Number one best fermented food that's easy to find and use is vinegar. You've got to give the assembly line to make butyret what it needs and vinegar supplies acetic acid the short chain fatty acid that it needs. Now if you want a deep dive about other videos all about the benefits of vinegar go to my YouTube channel and check out vinegars. Now acetic acid is also a communication system between our gut bacteria and our mitochondria and acetic acid as well as butyric acid are one of the best ways to uncouple mitochondria and once you uncouple your mitochondria you get profoundly good health. Probiotics even if they were in vinegar are long dead but those dead probiotics also carry information. So for instance apple cider vinegar with the mother. The mother is actually all the dead bacteria and what's left over of the polyphenols in apples and those dead bacteria also carry information and it's a really exciting information that you're going to learn about in gut check. Dead bacteria tell tales. Now vinegar is a great way to do this. Vinegars make you actually uncouple your mitochondria to lose weight and one of the miracles of weight loss with vinegars is this uncoupling effect. Now I loved age balsamic vinegar. It has multiple available polyphenols. It's actually the richest source of resveratrol that you can get. I happen to have a brand that I recommend. I have no relationship with them. They're called Napa Valley Naturals and you want the Grand Reserve. It's really thick and you just need a teaspoon or a tablespoon to make my famous fake Coke. You use sparkling water. I prefer San Pellegrino. I have no relationship with them and you put in some balsamic vinegar. Stir it around and presto change. Oh you have got a health enhancing compound that tastes really good and it tastes kind of like a fake Coke. Apple cider vinegar, champagne vinegar, red wine vinegar, sherry vinegar.  I've got probably eight different vinegars that we mix and match in our salads and it's a really easy way to get these post biotics that you need. Now here's a shocker. My second best favorite way of getting these fermented post biotics into you is raw cheese. News flash, raw cheese. What does raw cheese mean? Well it turns out cheeses particularly in Europe do not require pasteurization to make it into the United States. The bacteria and the yeast in milk actually impart great post biotics in the process of making cheese and there's particularly some raw cheese bacteria that actually promote weight loss. And surprise, surprise three of the blue zones that I've talked about before and you'll learn more about you gotcha. Three of the blue zones eat large amounts of raw sheep and goat cheeses as part of their diet.  Wow, so you get a double benefit. Now here's number three that is going to shock you and this is straight from long-lived people. Most people probably don't know that the longest life expectancy in the world by country is in Andorra. Now Andorra is this little tiny country between Spain and France up in the Pyrenees Mountains and these guys are sheep herders and they eat sausage every day. In fact a nearby town in France Toulouse basically lives on sausage and Toulouse despite living on sausage has the lowest degree of heart disease in all of France despite having this massive high saturated fat diet. What gives? It turns out that traditionally sausages are cured or aged by the addition of bacteria and bacteria eat the sugar molecules in the meat and they also fun fact eat new 5gc which is in beef lamb and pork which as many of you have read is a real mischievous molecule that really harms our health but fermentation of meat of sausages eliminates new 5gc and it also eliminates new 5gc in milk products. So strange as it may be traditional sausage making is a fermented food that has postbiotics fermented things that improve your health.  Now not so fast most sausages in the United States are not fermented you can't have a Jimmy Dean's breakfast sausage and get a benefit. Most sausages with an Italian name applied to them like pepperoni and salami are not fermented so buyer beware but you can find traditionally fermented sausages that are made in France or Portugal or Italy and they are findable and those are actually remarkably good for you. Who knew? So vinegar aged raw cheeses or aged cheeses from Europe in general and traditionally prepared sausages. One more last thing many of you know I have a very good friend a three times James Beard award-winning chef Jimmy Schmidt and Jimmy Schmidt produces sausages and bratwurst and low and behold Jimmy inoculates his sausages and bratwurst with bacteria FDA approved I may remind you and I was talking to him one day recently I said what the heck how did you know to inoculate your sausages and he says are you kidding that's the only way you could ever make a sausage legally in Europe so I'm just continuing a tradition so if a three times James Beard award-winning chef knows what to do I'm passing it on to you eat your fermented foods and buyer beware which ones to avoid. More amazing episodes just like this one watch now. Vinegars contain polyphenols and the exciting thing about vinegars is that each different vinegar has a different polyphenol.