Origins: Why Can't Chimps Talk?

For decades, evolutionary biologists have emphasized [music] the genetic near identity of humans and chimpanzees. Why would our DNA look so much like that of chimps, they ask, [music] unless our two species share a common ancestor. However, there are [music] major differences that are easily seen when examining the details. Discover why scientists make evolutionary assumptions >> [music] >> that lead them to create attention-grabbing headlines. If your DNA is so related to a chimp, will it ever discuss major league pitching or anything else with you? Coming up on today's edition of Origins, why don't chimps talk? [music] With Dr. Paul Nelson. >> [music] [music] >> Hello and welcome to Origins. I'm Ray Heiple. We have a fascinating show for you. Today's guest, Dr. Paul Nelson, is a philosopher of biology who has been involved in the intelligent design debate internationally for over three decades. In 1998, Paul received his PhD from the University of Chicago in the philosophy of biology and evolutionary theory. Since 2004, he has been a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute and more recently adjunct faculty in the science and religion program at Biola University. Welcome to the program, Paul. >> It's a treat to be here. >> You know, I love having you on the show. You always have such great information and I I the provocative title, Why don't chimps talk? Because it seems like they should from genetics, they're so close to us in terms of their DNA that it's a real puzzle why they don't have more human features like language. >> And so we're looking at we're going to look at something besides the DNA then. If the DNA is so similar and yet they can't talk then there's got to be another explanation. There's a mystery there. >> So let's start with a conversation. In a Starbucks. We're sitting in a Starbucks and it's a venti conversation, the big guy, right? [laughter] Uh and I tell you, Ray, I can walk from downtown Pittsburgh to Allison Park in one day. And you say, yeah, that's believable. You know, I know the geography here in Western Pennsylvania, you could do that and that's no problem. Then I say, I can walk from downtown Pittsburgh to Columbus in a day. And you begin to get a little skeptical and you say, I don't think so, right? Again, I know the geography of this part of the country. You're going to need some help and you're never going to do it in one day, >> No, you're unless you get a lot of training from a marathon runner or something. >> Exactly. >> [laughter] >> Uh and then I say, I can walk to Honolulu. And now you look at me like, Paul, you need to get some therapy. Right? That is not going to happen no matter how much time you have because there's this little thing called the Pacific Ocean, right? >> [snorts] >> So the point here is that these claims of about possibility are always anchored in everything else that we know about the world. So in the case of walking, we know what it requires, right? A normal adult male needs a certain amount of nutrition, needs shelter, needs good footwear, all of that sort of thing. And we have maps of the terrain. Now the puzzle we're going to talk about in this program has to do with this question but in a biological context. What's possible versus impossible? What do organisms need just to stay alive? You know, for normal function. And what are the maps? Where are, let's say, humans and chimps located in the terrain? Now, the way to think about this is not to be misled by similarity because it's certainly true that genetically we are closer to chimps than any other species on the planet and vice versa, right? But I've got a way to illustrate this that I think will help. >> Please, let's go. >> All right, so the question we are want to answer is what changes are possible versus impossible in the chimp-human relationship? So, here chimps, Pan troglodytes is their Linnaean name, remarkable creatures and genetically very, very similar to human beings. Here is Paul. >> [laughter] >> Uh that guy on the left is Larry Moran. He's a biologist at the University of Toronto. We're here in London in 2016. >> Uh-huh. >> And uh if you'll notice, let me just go back here, there are a lot of differences. Just visually you can see, you know, chimps and humans are not the same. Just take our eyes. So, chimps normally have pigmented sclera, right? The area around the iris. Here we are on the bottom, Homo sapiens, white. So, I was in a conversation with a biologist once about this. Actually a Christian who believed in evolution and I, you know, I asked him, I said, "Where in the chimp and human genome are the bases that explain this difference?" He said, "Well, I don't know." And I said to him, "That's a minor difference. We're not talking about language or moral behavior. If we're related, you should be able to tell me where those genetic differences are that explain this very minor anatomical difference. In fact, if you look at the biology, the overall biology of chimps and humans, there are all kinds of interesting differences. So, for the males in the audience, this should be interesting. Chimps have a bone in their penis. We don't. We have eyebrows, they don't. We have lots of differences in details of our anatomy such as chimps have a crest called the sagittal crest that cross the top of their head where if you ran your hand over the top of a chimp's head, you'd feel a ridge right here. I'm looking at you, you're pretty smooth up there, >> [laughter] >> right? Same with me, it's been more obvious as I've lost my hair. So, as you go through these differences, you realize, yeah, we may be genetically similar, but in, you know, our biology, our anatomy, there's actually a lot of very interesting differences. And when you look at our behavior, the differences are dramatic. So, we care for the sick. Right? We build hospitals for them. We search for medical cures for the diseases they may they may suffer. Uh we have sustained running. It's hard to believe by looking at me now, I used to be a marathoner. Wow. Yeah, I did the Chicago Marathon three times. No other primate goes for long runs like human beings do. Uh we can store food. We can use fire and so forth. So, you look at this and behaviorally, wow, we're pretty different, actually, despite our genetic similarity. So, a biologist would say to me, Paul, Paul, an evolutionary biologist, you're ignoring all these similarities. The similarities are the signal that gives us that pattern of evolutionary relationship, right? And he you point to something like hemoglobin. So, this is a protein in our blood and in the blood of chimps that carries oxygen. There are iron atoms in the center there that bind the oxygen molecule. So, right now you and I are breathing, taking in O2. Hemoglobin is binding that that molecule in our lungs and carrying it to our brain, to our tissues, and so forth, and then releasing it. We have hemoglobin in our blood to carry oxygen, chimps do also. And it's remarkable when you look at the amino acid sequence of hemoglobin. Here's the human sequence. You can think of this like a very long word where each of these letters represents a unit, an amino acid. And here's the chimp sequence. There's one difference right here. We have a methionine right there, they have a valine, otherwise these proteins are identical. And there are many proteins in chimps and humans that are exactly the same. So, if I showed you the protein, you wouldn't be able to say did it come from a chimp or a human? So, a geneticist who thinks that we're related to chimps will look at something like this and say, "How can you explain these similarities if we don't share a common ancestry?" Now, the puzzle for him is if we're so similar at the molecular level, down at the nuts and bolts, why don't we look like this? >> [laughter] >> And don't make any jokes about people you know who do look like this. >> I was thinking of the hair on the head. I would take that. >> Yeah. Yeah. We don't look like that. And why are we so different in many other respects? This has been a puzzle in evolutionary theory for a long time. At least as I've been following it for 50 years. And it was first noticed in 1975 by Mary-Claire King and Allan Wilson at Berkeley in a famous paper in science where they said, "You know, really it's a paradox for evolution that our genetic similarity to chimps is not reflected in the organismal differences at a higher level." So, in this paper they point out every bone in a chimp can be distinguished from its corresponding bone in a human just by visual inspection. They they just say, "Look, you can you can see that we're different." So, uh Jonathan Marks, commenting uh on the same puzzle, he's a an evolutionary biologist at University of North Carolina, said, "If the genetics is telling you you're nearly identical and yet the biology is telling you you're very different, the genetics is obviously failing to give you the whole story." So, let's look at it this way. In the middle there, we've got CA, that stands for common ancestor. On the left, we have chimps. On the right, we have humans. Now, someone might say, "You know, it's just a question of transforming these similarities like you can transform gold into lead, right? There's gold on the left, there's lead on the right. There must be some pathway by chemistry that you can transform one of these elements into the other." And that was the project of the alchemists. They looked at these two elements and they said, "Look, they're very very similar. They have the same crystal structure, they're dense, they're easily malleable, and so forth. It should be possible using chemistry to go from one to the other." Well, you can't do it. Unless you have a particle accelerator, you're never going to transform gold into lead or vice versa. Actually, that would be a dumb thing to do to transform gold into lead. They were trying to go the other direction. So, similarities can be misleading. Now, my evolutionary biology friend might say, "Come on, Paul, that's wildly unfair. Darwin told us that descent, relationships of parent to offspring, is the only known cause of the similarity of organic beings, right? You resemble your parents, they resemble their parents, and so forth, because there is that parent to offspring relationship. Now, the funny thing about this statement in Darwin is he knew it was wrong. In The Origin of Species, just a few pages away from where he says this, he actually says similarity can be caused by lots of things. So, the difference that we need to keep in mind analytically is the difference between similarity and transformation. Similarity is an abstract mapping. Uh some of these similarities can be comical. For instance, they showed uh Mick Jagger, lead singer of The Rolling Stones, and Don Knotts from The Andy Griffith Show. They look like twins, okay? So, this is an abstract mapping. Transformation, by contrast, is a dynamic pathway. And we know that some transformations are possible because we can observe the pathway. For instance, unlike this pathway on the top, this evolutionary pathway, there is an observable pathway between uranium and lead. There's a process by which one of these elements is transformed into the other, and we can actually measure it. So, the problem with transformation is that evolution doesn't really understand it. Evolution is not a theory of similarity. It's a theory of transformation. Similarity just gives you more of the same thing. Transformation, by contrast, gives you genuine change over time. So, this is not well understood. Remember my example of the chimp eye compared to our eye. Nobody knows where those base pairs are in the DNA that explains that very, very simple difference. So, Darwin himself understood this. You know, he never used the word evolution except once in his Origin of Species. His preferred term for his theory was descent with modification. Descent gives you similarity, right? You resemble your parents. Modification, that's where the action is. That's where the transformation is going to occur. And Darwin said, you know, if those transformations can't be observed or they're not possible, my theory would fail. It would absolutely break down. So, he knew this was a critical test of his theory. In fact, this is how he put it in the Origin. If it could be demonstrated that any feature existed that could not arise by a natural pathway, [music] I'm simplifying, my theory would absolutely break down. So, he knew that he had to provide a mechanism for transformation. Ray, the interesting thing is similarity and transformation may not be compatible at all. And I've got a thought experiment about a fat mayor that will illustrate this. Well, we got to hold right there. Stay with us. We'll be right back after these messages. >> Welcome back to Origins. We're talking to Dr. Paul Nelson, who's been sharing about why don't chimps talk. >> A geneticist who thinks that we're related to chimps will look at something like this and say, "How can you explain these similarities if we don't share common ancestry? If we're so similar at the molecular level, down at the nuts and bolts, why don't we look like this? >> [laughter] >> If the genetics is telling you you're nearly identical, and yet the biology is telling you you're very different, the genetics is obviously failing to give you the whole story. So, similarities can be misleading. So, the difference that we need to keep in mind analytically is the difference between similarity and transformation. Similarity is an abstract mapping. Transformation, by contrast, is a dynamic pathway. Similarity and transformation may not be compatible at all. >> Paul, we went into the break and you gave us a provocative teaser about an illustration about a fat mayor that's going to help us understand the difference between similarity and transformation. >> All right. Let's talk about a fat mayor. Okay. Two sentences. Here's the first one. And this is the mayor talking. "My, this fresh baked German chocolate cake is delicious," said the fat mayor with obvious sincerity. >> Okay. >> Sentence number two. "My, this fresh baked German chocolate cake is delicious," said the fat mayor with obvious duplicity. >> Wow. >> Okay. Now, let's do some statistics on the similarity. 100 positions, characters, spaces, punctuation. So, they're identical at the level of a sequence. 94 positions are exactly the same. So, if you put the two sentences next to each other and aligned them and count it off, 94 of those positions would be identical. >> Like you showed us in that sequence before, all those letters in the with the protein and the amino acids, we could do the same thing here and we would get this amazing similarity. >> Amazing similarity. There's no denying the similarity. And 14 of the 15 words are are Now, think about the sentences themselves though, right? Could you substitute one for the other? Viewed as character strings, we got to admit, yeah, they're certainly similar. Again, referring back to those proteins, look at that amino acid sequence, they're definitely similar. Can they substitute for each other? Think about a story, and this is a key scene in the story, right? The fat mayor is being revealed either as a good guy or a bad guy. You cannot swap one sentence for the other without radically changing the meaning of the overall story because of that single word, sincerity versus duplicity. Sincerity tells you, he's a good guy, right? He really means what he says. Duplicity, he's saying something and he doesn't actually believe it, he's a bad guy. >> I mean, they're exact opposites. The meaning it it's it's just amazing. All that similarity and yet the actual meaning the the message of the sentence is the opposite. >> Is the opposite. What that should tell you is that similarity and transformation are not necessarily related to each other. When we look at chimps and humans, we see a lot of genetic similarity, a lot of protein similarity. When we climb up to the level of the organism, you and I are talking, we could have a chimp here, he'll never say a word, despite the fact of our near identity at the genetic level. So, the way to think about this is to separate the process of transformation from the signal of similarity and realize that the differences we see with chimps may be explained at a higher level than our genetics and our proteins. In other words, if you think about the the way you climb up in a biological system on the analogy of, let's say, electronic parts. I can give you transistors, resistors, motherboards, and that sort of thing that you can use either in a laptop or in a car stereo and the transistor itself is identical, but as you climb up in the levels to the system as a whole, you realize that the transistor is actually doing a slightly different job in one system versus the other and I shouldn't be misled by the signal of similarity. Because similarity, unlike what Darwin said, and he actually knew this, similarity can have multiple possible causes. Common design, common functional constraint, physical mechanism, or ancestry. So, you can't say just from seeing similarity that it automatically defaults to ancestry. There are other possibilities that have to be considered. Let me give you a very striking example of this. This is a what's called a multiple sequence alignment. So, each of the rows is a separate gene. There's a lot of them there. I don't know, maybe two and a half dozen. Each of the columns shows where those sequences are similar and you can see and some in some of these columns it's absolute identity from one to the other. If you show this kind of multiple sequence alignment of DNA to a molecular biologist and you don't tell them the back story, he's going to say, "Those sequences all share common ancestry. They have to. There's no way that you could have that degree of similarity unless there was a common ancestral template that gave rise to all of them." In fact, these sequences don't share common ancestry. They were bred, you could say, or evolved in separate populations in Jack Szostak's lab at Harvard. And what they code for is that figure here. This is what's called a ribozyme. It's called the hammerhead because it looks like a like a pinball hammer there, you know, you can see that shape? >> Yeah. >> And the reason they're all similar is the job that they have to do. In their paper, and these guys are not design theorists, they're evolutionary biologists, they say the reason we get this same sequence over and over is not ancestry, but in fact the functional role that these sequences have to perform, and they all converge to that particular architecture. So again, my point is don't let similarity mislead you. And I have one final thought experiment to illustrate this. Again, it's using natural language. Natural language provides a lot of helpful clues to understanding genetics. What explains then, if we're so similar at the genetic level, why we're so different at the organismal level? Again, thinking about chimps and humans. So I took the last 44 words of the Gettysburg Address, famous speech that Lincoln made after the horrible battle of the Civil War at Gettysburg, that is actually carved on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. I have to be honest, when I read that as a college student, I got choked up. I was crying cuz it's such a beautiful piece of writing. And we know what he's saying. He's saying, "Let's not let the American experiment die. We're in the middle of this terrible war, but we're going to carry on." And I can't I can't actually can't read it cuz I know I'm going to get choked up. But think about this as a text. And let's break it down into its lexicon. So here are 44 words, right? Each of them has an associated range of meanings. Some of them can be verbs and nouns. They've got subtle differences in how they uh can be used in a in a in a in a statement. We can take this lexicon and write a text that is exactly opposite in meaning to that of Lincoln. >> So taking these same 44 words, which you've put in alphabetical order here, >> Yep. >> and write something that's not going to be >> not going to be what Lincoln >> Lincoln said. Maybe the opposite of what Lincoln said. >> Exactly the opposite. So, I did this for myself. I took these words and I rearranged them. There they are. Same frequency of usage. So, I use them at about the same frequency that that Lincoln did. And you can see here, this is an anarchist manifesto. He's saying, "Forget about the government. You wasted your lives. Those people all died in vain. Forget about God. He doesn't exist. We can do what we want." So, you take Lincoln's meaning and the anarchist manifesto and you can get them both from the same set of words. Now, what this tells you about similarity is the genetic similarity that we see in humans and chimps and the protein similarity does not map up into what makes them different organisms. It's the higher level context that tells you you're going to be a chimp, you're going to be a human, you're going to record a program with Ray, and the chimps are always behind the bars when I go to the zoo. >> [laughter] >> It's a good thing. >> So, it's like there's this overarching purpose or design kind of programmed into the parts and that determines >> That's right. >> It's the higher level. >> the the way they do it. >> Exactly. The higher level tells the parts what to do. And if you think about what we make, you know, I I mentioned a moment ago a transistor. Think about any complex system that you know. There are going to be parts in there that can serve in multiple different contexts, and it's the context that tells that part, "Here's your job. Here's what you're going to do." >> Absolutely. Well, it was a pleasure having you on the show today, Paul. >> Always a treat. >> And thank [music] you for joining us. On today's program, we looked at the incredible similarity between chimps and humans [music] at the level of the cell. And we saw proteins and amino acids so similar and yet at the same time [music] we noticed the many profound differences in appearance and behavior. [music] And we noted the fundamental difference between similarity and transformation and how often we find that similarity does not bring about [music] transformation. The Bible shows also what we see in science that God [music] made similar creatures but they do not transform from one to another. Just goes to show you that we know what the Bible says is true [music] and the proof is all around you. If you enjoy Origins, we sure could use your help to keep this creation television program [music] on the air. Your support both prayerfully and financially make a big [music] impact. So let's work together to reveal how awesome our creator truly is and we'll see you next time right here on Origins. >> Thank you for [music] watching this edition of Origins. For a DVD of this series, you can order online or send a $12 donation to cover shipping and handling and write to Origins program number [music] 2604, Cornerstone Network, Wall, Pennsylvania 15148. >> This presentation was made possible by [music] the faithful prayers and financial support of you, our Cornerstone family.