August 22, 2025 • 43 mins
In this episode of Truth Be Told, host Tony Sweet sits down with renowned paleontologist and author Professor Donald Prothero to tackle one of the most debated questions of all time: How old is the Earth? From scripture’s claim of a young world just a few thousand years old, to science’s overwhelming evidence of a planet more than 4.5 billion years in the making—this conversation pulls no punches. Professor Prothero dives deep into the fossils, rocks, and geological records that reveal Earth’s true timeline while exploring why the controversy between science and faith continues to spark debate. This isn’t just a discussion about numbers—it’s about how we view history, belief, and our place in the universe. Whether you’re driven by science, guided by scripture, or searching for answers in between, this episode will leave you questioning what you thought you knew.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
How old is the Earth? Well, today we're going to
be asking one of the oldest and most controversial questions
of all. For centuries, scripture has placed our planet's age
just a few thousand years old, while science insist we're
living on a world that's over four point five billion
years old. But what happens when faith in fact collide.
(00:22):
Joining us is renowned paleontologist and author, Professor Donald Prothero,
whose work has been at the front lines of this
very debate. Together, we'll explore the evidence that reveals Earth's
true timeline, why the controversy continues to divide so many,
and what's at stake when we choose belief over science
or science over belief. This isn't just about rocks or fossils.
(00:45):
It's about how we understand our place in history, the universe,
and even in our own belief system. Buckle up, because
by the end of this conversation you may never look
at our planet the same again. I'm tony sweet with
truth be Told. Please welcome to the Truth Be Told
Stone Studios. Paleontologist and author Professor Donald Prothero, Well, Welcome, welcome, welcome,
(01:09):
Doctor Protherea, how you doing great?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Thanks inviting me.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
You know, I'm excited because I saw this article about
science versus scripture and the true age of Earth, and
it was really fascinating to me. You know, for thousands
of years and that humans have been finding fossils that
(01:34):
are way older than you know, the current environment that
we live in. So I always found it fascinating how
they used scripture to say it was only a few
thousand years old, where science is saying it's billions of
years old. So I wanted to jump right in and
just say, what is the scientific basis for Earth? Is
(01:58):
Earth's age? And how do we know it's approximately four
point five billion years old?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, the whole idea is a relatively recent one, and
you know, like human natural intellectual history, not really until
about the seventeen eighties seventy nineties is anyone questioning the
literal interpretation of the Bible as being a document of
six thousand years of human history. And really the first
breakthroughs didn't come until the beginning of the twentieth century. Really,
not even until the nineteen fifties. That's how young this
(02:29):
field is. Do we really have a lot of different
kinds of methods where we could determine this age. And
the main way the way we go about this course,
so it's called radiometric dating. What you do is you
take certain minerals which are naturally occurring in rocks. They
have in them atoms which are unstable, you know, spontaneously
break down called radioactor decay, break down and release number
(02:52):
of different kinds of things like different radiation, and then
leave behind a daughter atom replaces the parent atom that
broke down, and so the number of the We know
the rate which these decay reactions occur, and we know
how it works for a variety of different kinds of
radiometric systems. So what we do basically then is we
take a crystal or usually many crystals of zircon ors,
(03:14):
a mineral that locks in all the parent atoms that
start out before the decay and all the daughter atoms
that are accumulated as the decay occurs, and the ratio
of those two is a measure of how long they've
been decaying. And we have this one, I'm very fairly calculated.
And the thing about it is we have this from
a variety of different radioactive elements that are in different minerals.
(03:36):
So we have two isotopes of uranium NIU in two
thirty eight, you're in two thirty five, both which decay.
Do different isotopes of lead. We have rubidiums eighty seven
which decays astronom eighty seven. Those are used for the
oldest rocks and the ones that are most relevant to
well we'll talk about in the second ere and then
we have a number of others. So the most common
used dating is a method for geological settings anything from
(03:59):
a million years old up until the Age of the Earth.
As it's called potassium argon, which is r gon forty,
so tastin for it decame to rn for. We use
that most of the time in geology. And then this
is the one that most people have heard about, so
it's called radiocarbon dating or carbon fourteen. Dating has a
number of different nicknames, and this is the one that's
most familiar to us because it's used a lot in archaeology.
(04:22):
But it only works at the most out about fifty
thousand years ago, which is radically young, and we don't
normally use it unless you're an archaeologist or you're working
in the late Ice Age specimens, which I actually do,
but most people don't. And paleontology work on much older stuff.
So anyway, there's a variety of methods, but you have
to apply them in the proper way, and so to
(04:43):
get to the punchline. Then the way we know that
the Earth in the universe are a certain age is
by measuring those radioactive elements, both the parent and the
daughter in these different types of materials. The oldest dates
who've come up with so far or four point five
sixty seven plus and minized zero zero zero zero point
zero zero zero one three billion with a b years
(05:05):
old ten to the nine years old that comes from
a number of meteorites what are called carbonaceous chondrites, which
have a composition that tells us they're from the earliest
Solar System before the planet's formed, So that gives us
the age of the Solar System. And then we have
a number of other meteorites which are also in the
four point five billion year old range, such as some
(05:25):
of the iron nickel meteorites which come from the cores
of other planets, and sometimes you get other meteorites as well.
There are moon rocks that are almost that old. The
oldest ones are around for four point five billion and
four point four billion so we have a pretty close
greechent agreement there that solar system is not much younger
than the age of the universe itself. And then the
(05:47):
key thing though is that we do not at the
moment have Earth rocks older than about four point two
four point three billion. But that's because the Earth has
a mobile crust and constant recycling it and destroying the
oldest crust. So we are lucky to find and we
had actually have mino grains and are four point four billion,
so we're close to that, but we don't have rocks
at that old age because there's a crush the dynamic.
But then we had convergence of moon rocks and meteorites
(06:09):
both which give four point five to sixty seven is
the oldest objects we know of, and we know this
from multiple independent i top e sistance or medium straw
on him, both isotopes of randium lead. All of that
tells us it's not some kind of a fluke. There are,
of course, people in the creation this community who deny
any rate acted dating as possible. That's say they don't
(06:32):
understand how it works. And my good friend Brent Dell Rymple,
who was one of the pioneers and Potassia Margon dating
the class student of Maya University, University and College right
used to teach. He points out, it's like you'd say,
go into a clock shop and there's a bunch of
clocks on the wall, and a couple of three of
them are all, you know, not working so well. They
(06:53):
weren't correcting a calibrat or whatever. You don't throw all
clocks because there are one or two that don't work.
You recognize it as on most of them that are
independently giving you the same answer are giving the same time,
then they must be right. And that's when he said
the creation is a point to some anomalist date here
are there usually because they don't understand how to use
it right. That isn't proof that the system is flawed.
(07:14):
That's proved they don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Wow, that's that's a great explanation. And I hope people
that are listening to this podcast or watching this podcast
they go back and listen to it a couple of
times because there's a lot in there. And then that's
the scientific side. I want to know if your thoughts
on how these Young Earth creationists interpret genesis to supply
(07:41):
a timeline that are only, you know, seven thousand years old.
Where do these calculations come from? Do you know?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
The first major influential attempt to do that was done
in the fifteen forties, to show you how antique it is,
by a famous scholar, Archbishop James Usher of Ireland. And
he was typical of the scholarly community of his time,
which cordusly accepted the Bible pretty much literally. And so
(08:08):
he did the so called Bigat method, where he would
look at the age of the patriarchs as mentioned in
the first books of the Bible, and the Lamaic begat
his son, so and so when he was six hundred
and seventy seven years old, and he begat his sons,
and they would do a little back calculation to determine,
you know, how many thousands of years opposedly were represented
by these people who lived in possibly long times. And
(08:30):
that's all taking this stuff literally. But even if you
do that, you can't get to the age of the
earth because that only covers a small portion of biblical history.
And so all of the scholars by the fifteen hundreds
and since then, of course, have worked on sort of
a calibrating that against what was known of Egyptian and
other ancient cultures at that time in their history, which
(08:51):
is of course much better known now, and so in
most cases that would give them answers in that range
of numbers. It's actually the number that but Usher, for example,
famous the game was four thousand and four BC, and
you wonder what's going on there. It's actually there's a
lot of fudging going on, starting with the fact that
at the time he wrote that, he believed, of course
that there should only be about six thousand years four
(09:13):
thousand years BC, two thousand years AD, and the old
scheme now they do BC SE Now those round numbers
were just deliberately sort of picked, you know, because it
sounded right, there would be only four thousand years before Christ.
And then the south four thousand and four BC comes
to the fact that even as early as the fifteen hundreds,
(09:34):
biblical scholars realized that Christ wasn't born on zero AD.
He was couldn't have been because Herod was died at
four BC and Christ supposedly was taken by Mayor Joseph
Marriy to Egypt to avoid being executed by Herod and
his people. That need in Israel, and that can't occurred
(09:54):
at any time later than four BC. So Christ himself had
to be born before four years before Christ, and so
bilical scholars knew this in the fifty hundreds, and so
that's what he does. He slaps together four thousand is
a round number, plus the four for the heird correction.
That's where that nuver comes from. It's pretty vious pulling
this out of his ass is what it really mounts to.
And that kind of thinking has persisted because if you're
(10:17):
a Biblical literalist, that's all you take is a source
of information, and so you can follow ice of calculation
or anyone else's calculations. There isn't any real rigorous way
to do that from the Bible alone, in even knowing
ancient history. Now we know quite a bit more than that,
especially when we have Sumerian and other civilizations that date
back to seven, eight, ten thousand years the years ago,
(10:40):
or at least four or five thousand BC. You're much
older than Bishop of Scholarshists calculations. So they're famous. A
little equip you see on the internet. You know, God's
creating the earth, and then the Samarians saying, oh yeah,
that's cool. Here's a beer. Is any of the brew
beer around five thousand so old? My beer anyway, So
(11:04):
that's where it comes from. And it just basically bounts
to they don't consider any other sources of information legitimate
but the Bible. So if that's the way you work,
then you don't listen to science, then that's the only
answer you're going to get. And sadly there's still people
who do that, oh for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
And from your experience, like what cultural or psychological reasons
make some of these people resist this overwhelming scientific evidence
that we have. What's your theory on that?
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Well? As someone who started as a Presbyterian was raised
that way my entire life until I got a chance
to go off to college and didn't have to be
forced attend church in my family anymore, and then began
to explore this. I learned to read the Bible in
the original Greek and the original Hebrew for the two
different testaments, and it really opens your eyes as to
how these things are really put together, largely because it's
(11:55):
so revealing when you realize how many mistakes are made,
how gonna copyers are, guities there are, the inconsistence are
especially in the Old Testament, which is a composite about
five different sources which are all from different eras and
for you know, had different agendas, so they often don't
agree with each other, which is where the contradictions come from.
So what was the questioning answer? I got?
Speaker 1 (12:16):
How, like the what cultural or psychological reasons?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Psychologically, so having understood how it is on the other
side of the PENCILA. My family was not biblical literalists,
but they were still devout. It's all about the belief
system that runs your life, and everything is tied to that,
and your identity is tied to that. And so if
you are sheltered in that kind of a church community
and you don't expose yourself to anything outside, and eve
(12:41):
time you find something that's inconvenient, you just shut it
out or dismiss it or don't listen. You're not going
to get any kind of conjuncture invasion. And so I've
been battling on the front lines of the evolution creations
of battles since the early eighties, even older in the
late seventies actually, but I started officially doing so in
the early eighties when I was a downstairs Illinois coordinator
(13:04):
for the Committee of Correspondence, which was the predecessor what's
now the National Center for Science Education. When I lived
in aloi my first teaching job, and I got pretty
familiar with the Curaginism through that experience. I actually debated
Dwaye Gish, who was their number one debater for many years,
and beat him during that period I lived there. And really,
what you learn from the experience, especially as you talk
(13:25):
to them, is that it's never about science, okay, It's
never about anything else except salvation, okay. And during a
fundamentalist evangelical church literal accepts the Bible as they interpret
it is obviously the thing they most count on, and
they cannot accept anything that contradicts little interpretation of the Bible, okay.
(13:49):
And so no amount of evidence and no amount of
argumentation will ever shake that kind of deep seated feet
in faith that basically does not allow for anything to
to condry or to challenge it. You know, I could
debate till I blew the face, which I did back them,
I don't waste my time doing it anymore, and you
can't convince them to change otherwise because they're not really
(14:11):
interested in an argument. The equal weight, you know, they
are only interested in that, at least in their their understanding.
If they or accept the Bible literally, then they're doomed
to hell. That's pretty hard to argue against. You can't
make people listen to evidence when they believe that if
they accept anything you're telling them, they go to hell.
(14:31):
You don't. I can't win that kind of win hearts
and lines.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So no, I totally agree. I grew up in the Kansas,
so I kind of know what you're talking about. I
want to kind of go back a little bit where
when it comes to carbon dating, what are some of
the misconceptions that exists about carbon dating and why it's
(14:56):
often missing represented in debates about the arth age Right.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
It's basically that each of these is topic systems has
its own restrictions of when and where you use it, okay,
and what materials you use it on. So most of
the systems I just mentioned, like the two forms of
uranium dating and rabbinium astronom datum and potassium marking, all
can only be done on eneous rocks of volcanic rocks
which have cooled down from a liquid state, and then
(15:23):
when they cool down, the crystals form as those crystals form,
they lock in the parent and daughter atoms, and so
those are only relevant to those kinds of rocks. So,
for example, you can't then date it, say, dinosaur fossil,
using those methods, because dinosaur fossils found sedimentary rocks, not
enious rocks. Okay. And so this is a constraint that
as you, a well trained geologist understand this, and they
would not ask to do otherwise that the carbon dating
(15:46):
is the exception lots of ways. Number one, of course,
it only works for very very young materials, right, fifty
thousand years and younger, okay, which, as I said, isn't
blink of an eye for me. You know, you're an
archaeologist to routine to work on things that are that younger,
and some anthropologists do as well, as says Iceh, geologists do.
Majority of panetologists and geologists don't even think about something
(16:08):
as young as fifty thousand years ago. So that's only
frame it's useful for, and you never try to use
it on anything older. Okay. It's like having a clock
that runs very fast and then runs out right. And
I've seen these creationists attempt to discredit the whole method
by saying Oh, well, they potassium argon dated this lava
(16:29):
flow around this fossil tree at forty million years old,
and then they got that radiocarbon data on the tree
of fifty thousand. Not what they got was that they
didn't understand what they were doing, because you try radiocarbon
dating and something older than fifty thousand, and you'll get nothing.
The clock's run dry, it stopped, and so that doesn't
prove anything's wrong with radio carbon dating. It proves you
(16:50):
don't know what you're doing. And so this kind of
contradiction is thrown in front of people who don't know
any better, and it sounds like you can't trust anything
in radiometric methods. Only the thing to be aware of
there is that these people are being dishonest with you,
because they should know full well that you don't use
redcarbon things radiocarbon dating on very old objects. They just
it's just like using a stopped watch. It doesn't help.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
So, yeah, that's that's funny. I want to use that
as a clip. So I want to talk about fossil
records and like rock strata, can they provide independent evidence
for Earth past age? Yes, in a different way, right, Yeah,
I was going to say, how do they do that?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Radiometric dating, which is a measure of dating numerical ages
millions of years, thousands of years, and so on, billions
of years, cage of the age of the Earth. And
then a technique with develop long for radiometric dating was
relative dating, where you just have a series of stratified
rocks first point out in sixteen s nine as a
matter of fact, stratified rocks, and you know that if
(17:53):
they are piling up, one layer on top of another
and top of another, that the ones at the bottom
of the stack should be older than the ones on
the top. And my analogy for my students in class
is like your desk and your messy dorm room. Right,
if you're, say, middle of semester, and you want the
paper from last night that you were working on, they'll
be at the top of the stack. And if you
(18:15):
want something from the first week at the semester, probably
at the bottom of the stack. Okay, unless of course,
are clean enough to actually move these things and disturb them.
But if you leave them piling up, that's what the
rock record does. And so we can get the relative
asi of things. We've known the relative asi of things
basically since the fifteen sixteen hundreds. Now these things are
younger than those things and so on, without numbers attached
to any of it. And then the numbers really didn't
(18:37):
come along until the early twentieth century, and really not
until the nineteen fifties. So they became widely available on
a large of different kinds of rocks when Potts smart
on dating came along. So that's how you do it.
And then so for example, we knew the sequence of
fossils in the rocks like trilobites from the Cambrian and
things like that, and they have names which were given
to them before we knew any numbers. So Cambrian was
(18:59):
a DeFi fin term of relative age defined on certain fossils,
usually before we had any idea how long ago the
Camerian was. And with all guests work until the early
twentieth century. And then along came volcanic cash dating of
these layers in the Cambrian and we be able to
start doing this and eventually, you know, we now have
it very well refined, although it changes all the time too.
(19:21):
That's another thing people in craazious community can't get used to,
is that science changes, science revises, science updates, and so
you look at any timescale and you find it's the numbers.
Everything else shifted a couple of million years here or
there all the time. That's because we keep getting better dates.
So since we get better dates, we change the timescale
a little bit. And that's the way it's supposed to work, right.
(19:42):
You don't stick with old numbers just because they're sacred. Okay,
you update the numbers as soon as you get better numbers.
And so one of the reasons I don't bother it
till you actually memorize too many of the numbers in
the timescale that they're almost always out of date by
the time you want to use them again. And that's okay.
We all carry around that version of the timescale on
our head, and then I can have a handy time
scale life. I want to look up specific numbers I
(20:04):
don't keep in my head.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So I Since truth be told, we're all about paranormal
ancient civilizations and stuff like that. When you let's say
you go to Egypt and you go to the Great Pyramid.
When does when you cut a rock, does that change
anything about the the finding of the age of that
(20:31):
rock from the cut or does it always stay the same?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
No, Well, it take a limestone block in the Great Pyramid.
First of all, you can't do that with radiometric dating
because it's said, merry, it's a limestone. So they're the
way you would date that rock. In fact, you can
date that rock this way is by looking at the
fossils there in it. And the limestones that make up
the pyramids are full of these little coin sized things
(20:56):
called nemilitis, which were so which would make my single
cell organ. But some of them the size of a
quarter the shell they secreted as they grew, and they
make up almost all those Geesea limestones there from what
they're called Middle eas Scene now and so they actually
tell us those right locks were originally formed in the
Middle as Scene and a shallow sea that ran all
the way from Gibraltar to Indonesia so called tedthy seaway uh.
(21:19):
And then so that tells you what age of the rock is.
That nothing you do to it other than cutting it
will change anything about it, and cutting it doesn't change stage.
And of course the age of when they're cut and
put up by ancient Egyptians is yet another much younger
of it. Neither one of those are of relevant or
radio dat You can't do it date rocks like that.
And again it's yet to know what you're doing and
(21:40):
know where it's appropriate.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Now that because I've I've talked to many theories, many
people about theories about the age of the Great Pyramid,
and I've heard.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Oh, yeah, there's a whole cult following it.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yeah, yeah, So I didn't. I didn't know if that
was something that would change.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Is that there's nothing thing you do to a limestone
it would change its numerical age. And the limestone self
has no radioactive elements in it, so it can never
have been dated that way anyway. It's only age is
determined by what fossils it contains. And it turns out
the whole limestone is made of fossils. That's what they
are to be like. By nature, limestones are formed by
fossil shells, and this case particular couper shells called umilities.
(22:21):
Tell Us is middle easying about fifty million years old.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
How would you, as an archaeologist determine the age of
the actual pyramid versus the limestone itself.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Well, whenever you can. The thing you look for is
something that will have organic carbon in it. And a
lot of the structures in ancient Egypt are not just
made of limestone, have wood and other things, are sometimes
charcoal and embedded with the known deposits of a certain
archaeological age. And if you have carbon, whether it's a
pharmaceay with charcoal or hearth, or lots of pottery for example,
(22:56):
is got carbon in its las and elsewhere in it,
so it's it's datable shell fragments from the recent but
most often its wooding and charcoal. As long as they're
not older than fifty thousand years ago, they can be
radiocarbonated and there they're reasonably good shape. And all Egyptian
society doesn't go back more than about eleven eight nine
(23:16):
thousand years ago at the outside, depending on who you
talk to, So they're all within the range of radio carbon.
That's where the numerica ages of Egyptian chronology have come from.
Once you know the sequence of events in Egyptian history,
and especially if good ig geotologists can read hieroglyphics and
recognize certain styles, you know pretty tightly when it, which
dynasty occurred, which pharaoh was there in power, and then
(23:40):
you can just go back to chronology. It's been done
on radio carbon of wood and others structures. Not in
its pyramids, not that much wood in them, but most
of the structures that were built about the same time do.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Yeah, that's I've never been. I've always wanted to go.
But have you been to Egypt since I've been there? Yeah,
So I'm going to go kind of go back with
the science in religion where the in misunderstanding about the
Earth's age. How does these misunderstandings of the age of
(24:14):
the Earth affect people's grasp on such things as evolution,
climate change, and other scientific issues.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
It's part of a larger piece the puzzle, which is
denying science whenever your religion and your faith demands you
do so. And you know, I actually wrote a different
book than the evolution book, or a different book called
a Reality Check about Science Niles and way back the
harmless days of g George W. Bush for science Now
became a major party platform and tried to argue and
(24:48):
it's still, of course true, just worse than it's ever
been that science Nile is a bad thing for the
country and for the world. And it comes to lots
of forms, right, Denying climate change means that the planet's
already changing and we could every year. So you know,
the age of the Earth is something that doesn't make
you feel secure and comfortable that the humans and the
center thinks. There's where we come in with this topic,
(25:08):
is that you know, the understanding the science of the
age of the Earth and the Earth's history and of
course evolution, those do not make humans the center of
the universe. But we've known that for a very long time,
ever since we discovered we were a tiny little planet
on a minor soular system and a very far our
edge of one galaxy out of millions of galaxies. Humans
ego has been beaten down for ever most four years
(25:32):
now thanks to science efic discoveries. So the usual practice
for people who are about their religious fundamentalists especially is
to reject anything that tells them what they don't want
to hear. And they're entitled to that, of course, but
they miss out on the other side of it, which
is this glorious world of science and what we now
understand that we did not understand a few hundred years ago,
(25:54):
what doesn't give us a secure anth percentric humans are
all important view of the world, but it does give
us a world view that is satisfying, because every time
we test against reality, it turns out to be correct.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, and I know it's so important to learn about
history biblically and also with science. I think it's something
that we shouldn't separate because it's very important.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
There are plenty of people managed to do this right.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
My good friend, the late Stephen J. Gould, who is
a very prominent panaeontologist by generation ahead of me, famously
called it non overlapping magisteria, which is this fancy of
saying religion has its domain. Do you know it does
things like makes for pronouncements on culture and pronouncements on
spirituality and pronouncements on morality. Whether or not you accept
(26:48):
that is another issue. And it isn't supposed to be
messing around with things like science, which we've only had
learned in the last four and years, and we were
not going back to Stone age beliefs about the world,
a priest on age belief about the world. Actually, so
there's you know, there are two worlds, and they don't
ness that to conflict if you don't take the Bible
(27:09):
literally and believing if someone has read the Bible in
both Greek and Hebrew. It's not possible to take it
literally because you discover once you're reading the original out
full of flaws and mistakes and corrections and all the
other things are in there. You can't, especially if the
King James version, which is the worst translation, availed.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
So uh, well, before we get out of here, I
do have a couple more questions about what advice would
you give students and educators that are going into the
field of science where they're caught in between the scientific
evidence and religious pressure. What what would you your years
(27:45):
of experience, especially in the current environment.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Basically, you just got to do what you can to
keep up with what's going on in sciences. Right, so
if you're teaching science or working in sciences, you do
all you can to find out what the latest ideas are,
the latest discoveries are, the latest data are, and that
applies things like understanding Earth history or newest information about
the date of some event. Those are things suspicious geologists
(28:12):
which we get to keep track of. And then it's
up to you personally how much this does or does
not affect your religious morality whatever you want to call it.
Part of the world you know that a lot of
people are devoutly religious them A number of my friends
are good Christians, especially good Catholics, have no problems with
doing that and still being top rons panetologists. There's no
(28:34):
inherent contradiction in being a religious person and being scientific,
as long as you don't have for the two of
them messing around in each other's backyards. Right, You just
don't let religion mess around something it's not qualified to
tell you, and that especially includes things about science. You
can believe all you want to believe about non scientific issues.
That science is based on a reality. It's external to us,
(28:57):
and you can try to deny it all you like,
but it just keeps on coming back. You know it's true,
whether or not you believe it.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Well, what strategies have you found most effective in presenting
these complex scientific evidence and too nonscience people.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Well, most of the time I'm dealing with a college
student audience or you know, public audience. I don't attack
religion directly, because that's not a strategy, you know. I
just play laid out plain as simple as we did
today about what we know and what we think we know.
We I'm not sure of you know, I'm being very
honest where our data come from and where we don't
yet have good data. That's the way all sciences have
(29:37):
to be that through tentative they have to be honest
with their limitations. I mean, now, we're never absolutely fun,
you know about we are sure of something on hundred
percent that doesn't work. In science, everything has probabilities. And
most of the time I don't tread over on the
other side because it's not relevant. You know, it's not
an issue. When I'm taking a teacher class science students
at a cause level, I don't normally bring the religion
(29:59):
up at all, and I don't really don't get asked,
although I don't see them in person much anymore thanks
to COVID, But when I had in person classes, I
rarely I hardly can remember any instance of creation just
trying to challenge me or raise this issue. Now there
are exceptions, and the main thing I could think I
was on the earliest part of my teaching career when
I taught in Knox College in Gilsburg, Illinois. That's why
(30:21):
I was the Dowastaded, Illinois coordinator for the ill Music Correspondence.
I decided to tackle the problem head on and what
I did is, since this is a liberal arts college,
it's a little tiny college for Knox College in Gilsburg
and lay a liberal arts college where they wanted interdiment courses.
I did a class called Science, Creation and the Cosmos,
and so it had a little bit of cosmology, a
(30:44):
lot of methods and philosophy of science, a little foundation
of where evolution near body comes from the evidence that
supports it. And then I actually went into the history
of creationism and how they developed, because I am pretty
well read in that and what I knew about the
Bible from my own direct reading of it in the
original language. So by the time we actually talked about
a modern American creationism of the late twentieth century, like
(31:07):
Week seven, they were much more sophisticated than most college
students are in all these topics. And then I actually
threw it in, threw it out to them to do
the battle themselves. So I actually had the two divide
up the whole class about seventy into ten groups of seven,
and then one day we had a series of five
minute debates on the stage to show them number one
(31:28):
that debates are a terrible way to decide to sign
an issue. But what it has showed is that in
a debate format, creationists can give you some simplistic, one
dimensional argument that in fact assumes the wrong thing or
is it false to begin with in its premises, and
it's very hard for an evolutionist to handle them. And
ever in the room, by this point I understood that
creationism was garbage, and they could see this happening. The
(31:50):
debate was winnable for criatis because the format works that way,
and especially if the creationists is framing it in their terms,
then the scientist has to do a lot of backtracking
to expl blame where they're wrong. And the only time
I ever saw these scientific argument won by the other
side was the when the creation has put out their proposition.
These are all, by the way, the standards, ten or
(32:11):
so arguments the creationists keep using over a century now.
They all have been debunked a thousand times, but they
never stop using them. Uh. And someone in the creationists
debate thing got up and said, of some particular argument
and they're cut off by the other side. That stopped
right there. Your premise is wrong, and the debate that's it.
If you give them the opportunity to frame it in
(32:32):
their form. When I debated, gave duayensh this is what
he does. He flrows out one lie after one misconception,
after one distortion after another straw man, and you as
a you're on the defense. As a scientist, you can't
undo the damage as quickly as they can do it.
And we now see this, by the way in modern politics,
where certain politicians annoying throwing lies at you and another
(32:52):
drop stream and you just can't keep up with all
the things that you know are wrong with it, and
then people just sort of fold and give up. So
theh gallop is still a very popular political strategy. You know,
one politician particular is famous or just spearing lives and
misconceptions right and left. I won't name them, but you
can probably guess what you mean.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Is that a debate that you did? Is it on video?
Speaker 2 (33:14):
No? It was eight So somewhere in my boxes and
the garage, I have a few audio recordings I would
love to hear. I gave us set to the NCSC
when I was a I could find them, but I
don't know where they are anymore. It was a four
hour debate.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Uh yeah, And it was at Purdue University on a
Saturday night, and the Creation is the course organized it.
The guy who ran it was an engineer at Purdue UH.
And they set it up so that you know, it
was Saturday night, big in a big ten university. Nobody's
going to show up except religious people, right because there's
so many a Saturday night at Purdue campus. And so
what we ended up with was a giant room full
(33:51):
of all these church people that have been bust in
from all over Indiana for this event because Creations are
well organized. And me and five students who rode with me,
Allish Mill. That was my total support system.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
You're a beasts. He's going in that room.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Yeah, I knew that it was gonna be. The best
I could do for is a draw. You can't win
these debates because they won't concede anytime that you right way.
And they're not fair debates because there's no moderator to
tell the lucretion is you just made a mistake here
or you just got beaten here. It's not a true
debate like you do in say high school or college
for instance. What they did was that they set it
(34:28):
up and luckily I won the coin toss so I
got the first and the third half hour of the
first two hours.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Then a week beforehand, I went to watch Dwayne Gish
give the same exact speech. And you were sit to
Illinois Champagne or Banna, so you're ready an unopposed lecture
of the sand election. It's always the same lecture. His
code ecxillies are all faded pink by this point, and
it's always the same order with the same punchlines. And
so I watched him do this in general audience where
(34:54):
they didn't charge money, and he got booed and heckled
a lot by the intergial noise students. They weren't being
busted from churches. These were real students. So but I
got to see his slide order, and so I knew
he wouldn't change a thing. He never listens to his pony,
never changes the thing. He just a robot, or used
to be a robot, does the same thing over and
over again. So then I made his point in my
(35:15):
first half hour of debunking all of his points in
his first half of his slide show before he got
to them. And then the third half hour when I
was up first again, I debunked the second part of
a slide show before he got them. He didn't change
a thing. He didn't even acknowledge there were people the
audience could see the contradiction, even though because I had
pointed out when I said these things, he's going to
(35:36):
say this and he will not admit this, and they
caught it, and he didn't. You know, he doesn't listen
to his opponent. He doesn't answer the pony.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
So I just wanted to hear himself.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
As a debate goes. I had at least speaken him
to a draw by the end of two hours, But
that's going back to one of the original points. After
the break, you know, after two hours we were finally
given a break. They gave us a stack of a
little three by five indix cards which questions the audience,
and this standard question was for both of us to
answer on the top. But then belief that were the
(36:07):
questions that was sent to me from the audience, and
it was all about are you homosexual? Are you an adulter?
Or are you going to hell? There was not a
single science question anywhere in that because they don't give
a damn about science.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Right, I was going to say lives.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Better and means they have things like devices like this
in their possession. But they this was all about you know,
salvation and faith, and you know, that's all they cared about.
They didn't care that. You know, I'm talking to science
for two hours and they don't listen to any of it.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
So that, honestly, when when they know a lot of people,
when they know they're beaten, they go for the yeah,
the being personal, yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Yeah, yeah, And in this case, it's very much about
your religious beliefs or sex life, your or sex orientation.
You know. There were some jokes and good kishes, standard talk,
which I knew exactly when they were coming and what
they were. Like, you show a slide of a chimpanzee.
What did that picture my grandson do getting in there?
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Yeah, so he used the same thing.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
I like, gish, who's mocking the idea that related to apes?
But I was like a twenty five year old college professor,
you know, single, and I'm clearly not old enough to
have a grandson. There's no way I could steal that joke, right,
it makes sense to do it. It was possible, and
I was tempted to do it, but it didn't make
sense to me.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Did do that, so well, you're going to have to
find that audio. But before before we go, I know
you have talked about writing books because I'm all about UFOs,
I'm all about bigfet I'm all about that stuff. You
actually wrote a book about the UFOs, and I kind
of want to just touch briefly on your theory because
(37:44):
people that listen to Truth be Told definitely want to
know what science says about extraterrestrials.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Oh, that's exactly what the title of the book is.
It's called UFOs, Ken Trails and Aliens. What science says.
There we go, and I came out a few years ago.
My Tim Callahan, my co author, and I wrote a
few years ago won an award for the Outstanding Science
Book and the Group of the Group of Committee for
Science a Bad Investigations, So I have that work behind
me actually. But anyway, basically the evidence is there is
(38:15):
no evidence, okay, as in, eyewitness testimony is completely useless
because humans are terrible video recorders and misremember and mis
interpret everything we see. So you have to have hard
physical evidence. Well, the hard physical evidence is also non existent.
It comes becast mostly of things that are completely interpreted wrong.
(38:37):
People will talk about, for example, Area fifty one. My
dad worked for Lockey his whole career. He was at
Area fifty one. Oh wow, And yes, well he was
still active at Lockey until before he retired. He helped
build the SR setting on Blackbird, which is the spy
plane that was probably the basis for a lot of
the UFO sightings that happened in the fifties and sixties.
(38:57):
Were many. When you know, the thing that was built
like you know, so a flying saucer, and it traveled
at Mock three at ten hundred thousand feet high above airliners,
so commercial airliners wouldn't have any idea what it was
because it was top secret anyway. And so when he
was there, you know, there was nothing much more than
it was a top secret spy airplane base where they
(39:18):
tested spycraft. And they did put it there deliberately. I've
been just as close as you can be to it,
but of course you can't go past security perimeter. They
put it there so you could not observe it from
the ground level anywhere. It's completely surrounded by mountains that
are held in the security perimeter, and until satellites came along,
nobody could see at any other angle you couldn't fly
over it or anything like that. It was designed back
(39:38):
in trol that aft World War two. Basically he did
test spiplanes. So they did the stealth bomber there, or
a self fighter there which my dad worked on as well. Wow.
Or that they did the U two which my dad
worked on. And so he was there on the Janet flights.
They're called out of Vegas a couple of times, and
he was never allowed to talk about this until shortly
before he passed away. And that point all the security
(39:58):
restrictions had been lifted on the people who work for
something contractors like Lockie did built up there. And in
that point he also told me, I think we were
watching late night show about some UFO thing and they
talked about Aaron fifty one. He was laughing his head
off because he was actually a witness, and he said,
this is all garbage.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Well, I'm going by that length if you all do
another show, So.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
I'm going to have you back for that. But I'm
sure some people are very disappointed to hear that.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Well, if you look online, I have a ted talk
only eighteen minutes long. The whole essence of y UFOs
are not real. Well they're unidentified, but they're not.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Any that's right, right, Okay, So last question before we
I know you're busy man, and you know, getting back
to doing what you do. But what if you could
go back in time? And this is just kind of
a fun question. If you can go back in time
and the time machine any moment in Earth's history, what
(40:56):
what going clear back to four point five billion era
would you pick? And why.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
I'm actually at first it works on sevens like mammals
from the last sixty six million years and the interval
time I've spent the most working on is a period
called the East and Oligacy, which is around thirty seven
to around thirty million years ago, which is the kind
of fossils you find, examples the Big Badland South Dakota.
That the best places to see fossils like that. So
I've studied all the fossils out that that time and place.
(41:25):
So I found a time machine. I go back to the
Big batter than South Dakota thirty million years ago. The
cool animals they had then are no less interesting me
than dinosaurs are to other people. You know, I've worked
on dinosaurs too, and that was how I got started peneonology,
but I'm a fossil mammal person now. Currently my main
focus is American fossil camels, which I'm just about twelve.
(41:46):
It's a big book on it. So behind me there
on my left, on my right left as you view
me on the screen, there that's a giant draft like
camel which I've worked on. So that book is supposed
to come out this fall American Fossil Camels.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
So that would be pretty I would I mean work.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Done rhinos in a bunch of other American fossils too, so.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
That would be great. And if take me with you
because I wouldn't mind seeing that era too. So well,
how do people find you? Are you on Instagram? You
have a website or.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, I have an Instagram site. I just type in
my name, Donald Prothero. It'll be the first hit. I
have a website, although it's currently down. I got to
get it back up again. Mostly just has links to
all my publications. The main thing is that if you
really wanted to learn something, I have a YouTube channel.
Oh yeah, call Prehistoric Parade if you type in prehistoric
(42:34):
Parade and then my last named Prothero Prehistoric parade. Any
version of that, you'll see. I released a YouTube video
once a week since over a year ago. Now, wow,
each one is about five to ten minutes long, and
it's about some aspect of the fossil record, usually evolution
of whales, evolution of horses, evolution of rhyano's, evolution to elephants,
all these things we know so much about. So it's
(42:55):
lucky to focused on fossil mammals. But that's what I
know the best. And but I have got other topics
in there as well. And so if you go to
pre to start pray and you'll find I've got a
ton of these videos all posted. I've got to get
some new ones up pretty soon because I haven't done
any since I did a lot of museum travel and
so on this last couple of months.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Well, hopefully people will go over and support you and
thank you for writing all the books and doing what
you do. And I always say I have great respect
for people that go to school and do the research
that we don't do. We just learn from you, so
you'll always be professor.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
That's what the books are for. Yep.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
So all right, well, thank you so much, and thank
you everybody for joining us and we hope that you
enjoyed it. Please come back every Friday for truth be
told with me Tony Sweet and here on the club,
here and amal on Network. Until next time, take care
of yourself and each other. Bye,
How old is the Earth? Well, today we're going to
be asking one of the oldest and most controversial questions
of all. For centuries, scripture has placed our planet's age
just a few thousand years old, while science insist we're
living on a world that's over four point five billion
years old. But what happens when faith in fact collide.
(00:22):
Joining us is renowned paleontologist and author, Professor Donald Prothero,
whose work has been at the front lines of this
very debate. Together, we'll explore the evidence that reveals Earth's
true timeline, why the controversy continues to divide so many,
and what's at stake when we choose belief over science
or science over belief. This isn't just about rocks or fossils.
(00:45):
It's about how we understand our place in history, the universe,
and even in our own belief system. Buckle up, because
by the end of this conversation you may never look
at our planet the same again. I'm tony sweet with
truth be Told. Please welcome to the Truth Be Told
Stone Studios. Paleontologist and author Professor Donald Prothero, Well, Welcome, welcome, welcome,
(01:09):
Doctor Protherea, how you doing great?
Speaker 2 (01:12):
Thanks inviting me.
Speaker 1 (01:14):
You know, I'm excited because I saw this article about
science versus scripture and the true age of Earth, and
it was really fascinating to me. You know, for thousands
of years and that humans have been finding fossils that
(01:34):
are way older than you know, the current environment that
we live in. So I always found it fascinating how
they used scripture to say it was only a few
thousand years old, where science is saying it's billions of
years old. So I wanted to jump right in and
just say, what is the scientific basis for Earth? Is
(01:58):
Earth's age? And how do we know it's approximately four
point five billion years old?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Yeah, the whole idea is a relatively recent one, and
you know, like human natural intellectual history, not really until
about the seventeen eighties seventy nineties is anyone questioning the
literal interpretation of the Bible as being a document of
six thousand years of human history. And really the first
breakthroughs didn't come until the beginning of the twentieth century. Really,
not even until the nineteen fifties. That's how young this
(02:29):
field is. Do we really have a lot of different
kinds of methods where we could determine this age. And
the main way the way we go about this course,
so it's called radiometric dating. What you do is you
take certain minerals which are naturally occurring in rocks. They
have in them atoms which are unstable, you know, spontaneously
break down called radioactor decay, break down and release number
(02:52):
of different kinds of things like different radiation, and then
leave behind a daughter atom replaces the parent atom that
broke down, and so the number of the We know
the rate which these decay reactions occur, and we know
how it works for a variety of different kinds of
radiometric systems. So what we do basically then is we
take a crystal or usually many crystals of zircon ors,
(03:14):
a mineral that locks in all the parent atoms that
start out before the decay and all the daughter atoms
that are accumulated as the decay occurs, and the ratio
of those two is a measure of how long they've
been decaying. And we have this one, I'm very fairly calculated.
And the thing about it is we have this from
a variety of different radioactive elements that are in different minerals.
(03:36):
So we have two isotopes of uranium NIU in two
thirty eight, you're in two thirty five, both which decay.
Do different isotopes of lead. We have rubidiums eighty seven
which decays astronom eighty seven. Those are used for the
oldest rocks and the ones that are most relevant to
well we'll talk about in the second ere and then
we have a number of others. So the most common
used dating is a method for geological settings anything from
(03:59):
a million years old up until the Age of the Earth.
As it's called potassium argon, which is r gon forty,
so tastin for it decame to rn for. We use
that most of the time in geology. And then this
is the one that most people have heard about, so
it's called radiocarbon dating or carbon fourteen. Dating has a
number of different nicknames, and this is the one that's
most familiar to us because it's used a lot in archaeology.
(04:22):
But it only works at the most out about fifty
thousand years ago, which is radically young, and we don't
normally use it unless you're an archaeologist or you're working
in the late Ice Age specimens, which I actually do,
but most people don't. And paleontology work on much older stuff.
So anyway, there's a variety of methods, but you have
to apply them in the proper way, and so to
(04:43):
get to the punchline. Then the way we know that
the Earth in the universe are a certain age is
by measuring those radioactive elements, both the parent and the
daughter in these different types of materials. The oldest dates
who've come up with so far or four point five
sixty seven plus and minized zero zero zero zero point
zero zero zero one three billion with a b years
(05:05):
old ten to the nine years old that comes from
a number of meteorites what are called carbonaceous chondrites, which
have a composition that tells us they're from the earliest
Solar System before the planet's formed, So that gives us
the age of the Solar System. And then we have
a number of other meteorites which are also in the
four point five billion year old range, such as some
(05:25):
of the iron nickel meteorites which come from the cores
of other planets, and sometimes you get other meteorites as well.
There are moon rocks that are almost that old. The
oldest ones are around for four point five billion and
four point four billion so we have a pretty close
greechent agreement there that solar system is not much younger
than the age of the universe itself. And then the
(05:47):
key thing though is that we do not at the
moment have Earth rocks older than about four point two
four point three billion. But that's because the Earth has
a mobile crust and constant recycling it and destroying the
oldest crust. So we are lucky to find and we
had actually have mino grains and are four point four billion,
so we're close to that, but we don't have rocks
at that old age because there's a crush the dynamic.
But then we had convergence of moon rocks and meteorites
(06:09):
both which give four point five to sixty seven is
the oldest objects we know of, and we know this
from multiple independent i top e sistance or medium straw
on him, both isotopes of randium lead. All of that
tells us it's not some kind of a fluke. There are,
of course, people in the creation this community who deny
any rate acted dating as possible. That's say they don't
(06:32):
understand how it works. And my good friend Brent Dell Rymple,
who was one of the pioneers and Potassia Margon dating
the class student of Maya University, University and College right
used to teach. He points out, it's like you'd say,
go into a clock shop and there's a bunch of
clocks on the wall, and a couple of three of
them are all, you know, not working so well. They
(06:53):
weren't correcting a calibrat or whatever. You don't throw all
clocks because there are one or two that don't work.
You recognize it as on most of them that are
independently giving you the same answer are giving the same time,
then they must be right. And that's when he said
the creation is a point to some anomalist date here
are there usually because they don't understand how to use
it right. That isn't proof that the system is flawed.
(07:14):
That's proved they don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Wow, that's that's a great explanation. And I hope people
that are listening to this podcast or watching this podcast
they go back and listen to it a couple of
times because there's a lot in there. And then that's
the scientific side. I want to know if your thoughts
on how these Young Earth creationists interpret genesis to supply
(07:41):
a timeline that are only, you know, seven thousand years old.
Where do these calculations come from? Do you know?
Speaker 2 (07:47):
The first major influential attempt to do that was done
in the fifteen forties, to show you how antique it is,
by a famous scholar, Archbishop James Usher of Ireland. And
he was typical of the scholarly community of his time,
which cordusly accepted the Bible pretty much literally. And so
(08:08):
he did the so called Bigat method, where he would
look at the age of the patriarchs as mentioned in
the first books of the Bible, and the Lamaic begat
his son, so and so when he was six hundred
and seventy seven years old, and he begat his sons,
and they would do a little back calculation to determine,
you know, how many thousands of years opposedly were represented
by these people who lived in possibly long times. And
(08:30):
that's all taking this stuff literally. But even if you
do that, you can't get to the age of the
earth because that only covers a small portion of biblical history.
And so all of the scholars by the fifteen hundreds
and since then, of course, have worked on sort of
a calibrating that against what was known of Egyptian and
other ancient cultures at that time in their history, which
(08:51):
is of course much better known now, and so in
most cases that would give them answers in that range
of numbers. It's actually the number that but Usher, for example,
famous the game was four thousand and four BC, and
you wonder what's going on there. It's actually there's a
lot of fudging going on, starting with the fact that
at the time he wrote that, he believed, of course
that there should only be about six thousand years four
(09:13):
thousand years BC, two thousand years AD, and the old
scheme now they do BC SE Now those round numbers
were just deliberately sort of picked, you know, because it
sounded right, there would be only four thousand years before Christ.
And then the south four thousand and four BC comes
to the fact that even as early as the fifteen hundreds,
(09:34):
biblical scholars realized that Christ wasn't born on zero AD.
He was couldn't have been because Herod was died at
four BC and Christ supposedly was taken by Mayor Joseph
Marriy to Egypt to avoid being executed by Herod and
his people. That need in Israel, and that can't occurred
(09:54):
at any time later than four BC. So Christ himself had
to be born before four years before Christ, and so
bilical scholars knew this in the fifty hundreds, and so
that's what he does. He slaps together four thousand is
a round number, plus the four for the heird correction.
That's where that nuver comes from. It's pretty vious pulling
this out of his ass is what it really mounts to.
And that kind of thinking has persisted because if you're
(10:17):
a Biblical literalist, that's all you take is a source
of information, and so you can follow ice of calculation
or anyone else's calculations. There isn't any real rigorous way
to do that from the Bible alone, in even knowing
ancient history. Now we know quite a bit more than that,
especially when we have Sumerian and other civilizations that date
back to seven, eight, ten thousand years the years ago,
(10:40):
or at least four or five thousand BC. You're much
older than Bishop of Scholarshists calculations. So they're famous. A
little equip you see on the internet. You know, God's
creating the earth, and then the Samarians saying, oh yeah,
that's cool. Here's a beer. Is any of the brew
beer around five thousand so old? My beer anyway, So
(11:04):
that's where it comes from. And it just basically bounts
to they don't consider any other sources of information legitimate
but the Bible. So if that's the way you work,
then you don't listen to science, then that's the only
answer you're going to get. And sadly there's still people
who do that, oh for sure.
Speaker 1 (11:18):
And from your experience, like what cultural or psychological reasons
make some of these people resist this overwhelming scientific evidence
that we have. What's your theory on that?
Speaker 2 (11:33):
Well? As someone who started as a Presbyterian was raised
that way my entire life until I got a chance
to go off to college and didn't have to be
forced attend church in my family anymore, and then began
to explore this. I learned to read the Bible in
the original Greek and the original Hebrew for the two
different testaments, and it really opens your eyes as to
how these things are really put together, largely because it's
(11:55):
so revealing when you realize how many mistakes are made,
how gonna copyers are, guities there are, the inconsistence are
especially in the Old Testament, which is a composite about
five different sources which are all from different eras and
for you know, had different agendas, so they often don't
agree with each other, which is where the contradictions come from.
So what was the questioning answer? I got?
Speaker 1 (12:16):
How, like the what cultural or psychological reasons?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Psychologically, so having understood how it is on the other
side of the PENCILA. My family was not biblical literalists,
but they were still devout. It's all about the belief
system that runs your life, and everything is tied to that,
and your identity is tied to that. And so if
you are sheltered in that kind of a church community
and you don't expose yourself to anything outside, and eve
(12:41):
time you find something that's inconvenient, you just shut it
out or dismiss it or don't listen. You're not going
to get any kind of conjuncture invasion. And so I've
been battling on the front lines of the evolution creations
of battles since the early eighties, even older in the
late seventies actually, but I started officially doing so in
the early eighties when I was a downstairs Illinois coordinator
(13:04):
for the Committee of Correspondence, which was the predecessor what's
now the National Center for Science Education. When I lived
in aloi my first teaching job, and I got pretty
familiar with the Curaginism through that experience. I actually debated
Dwaye Gish, who was their number one debater for many years,
and beat him during that period I lived there. And really,
what you learn from the experience, especially as you talk
(13:25):
to them, is that it's never about science, okay, It's
never about anything else except salvation, okay. And during a
fundamentalist evangelical church literal accepts the Bible as they interpret
it is obviously the thing they most count on, and
they cannot accept anything that contradicts little interpretation of the Bible, okay.
(13:49):
And so no amount of evidence and no amount of
argumentation will ever shake that kind of deep seated feet
in faith that basically does not allow for anything to
to condry or to challenge it. You know, I could
debate till I blew the face, which I did back them,
I don't waste my time doing it anymore, and you
can't convince them to change otherwise because they're not really
(14:11):
interested in an argument. The equal weight, you know, they
are only interested in that, at least in their their understanding.
If they or accept the Bible literally, then they're doomed
to hell. That's pretty hard to argue against. You can't
make people listen to evidence when they believe that if
they accept anything you're telling them, they go to hell.
(14:31):
You don't. I can't win that kind of win hearts
and lines.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
So no, I totally agree. I grew up in the Kansas,
so I kind of know what you're talking about. I
want to kind of go back a little bit where
when it comes to carbon dating, what are some of
the misconceptions that exists about carbon dating and why it's
(14:56):
often missing represented in debates about the arth age Right.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
It's basically that each of these is topic systems has
its own restrictions of when and where you use it, okay,
and what materials you use it on. So most of
the systems I just mentioned, like the two forms of
uranium dating and rabbinium astronom datum and potassium marking, all
can only be done on eneous rocks of volcanic rocks
which have cooled down from a liquid state, and then
(15:23):
when they cool down, the crystals form as those crystals form,
they lock in the parent and daughter atoms, and so
those are only relevant to those kinds of rocks. So,
for example, you can't then date it, say, dinosaur fossil,
using those methods, because dinosaur fossils found sedimentary rocks, not
enious rocks. Okay. And so this is a constraint that
as you, a well trained geologist understand this, and they
would not ask to do otherwise that the carbon dating
(15:46):
is the exception lots of ways. Number one, of course,
it only works for very very young materials, right, fifty
thousand years and younger, okay, which, as I said, isn't
blink of an eye for me. You know, you're an
archaeologist to routine to work on things that are that younger,
and some anthropologists do as well, as says Iceh, geologists do.
Majority of panetologists and geologists don't even think about something
(16:08):
as young as fifty thousand years ago. So that's only
frame it's useful for, and you never try to use
it on anything older. Okay. It's like having a clock
that runs very fast and then runs out right. And
I've seen these creationists attempt to discredit the whole method
by saying Oh, well, they potassium argon dated this lava
(16:29):
flow around this fossil tree at forty million years old,
and then they got that radiocarbon data on the tree
of fifty thousand. Not what they got was that they
didn't understand what they were doing, because you try radiocarbon
dating and something older than fifty thousand, and you'll get nothing.
The clock's run dry, it stopped, and so that doesn't
prove anything's wrong with radio carbon dating. It proves you
(16:50):
don't know what you're doing. And so this kind of
contradiction is thrown in front of people who don't know
any better, and it sounds like you can't trust anything
in radiometric methods. Only the thing to be aware of
there is that these people are being dishonest with you,
because they should know full well that you don't use
redcarbon things radiocarbon dating on very old objects. They just
it's just like using a stopped watch. It doesn't help.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
So, yeah, that's that's funny. I want to use that
as a clip. So I want to talk about fossil
records and like rock strata, can they provide independent evidence
for Earth past age? Yes, in a different way, right, Yeah,
I was going to say, how do they do that?
Speaker 2 (17:33):
Radiometric dating, which is a measure of dating numerical ages
millions of years, thousands of years, and so on, billions
of years, cage of the age of the Earth. And
then a technique with develop long for radiometric dating was
relative dating, where you just have a series of stratified
rocks first point out in sixteen s nine as a
matter of fact, stratified rocks, and you know that if
(17:53):
they are piling up, one layer on top of another
and top of another, that the ones at the bottom
of the stack should be older than the ones on
the top. And my analogy for my students in class
is like your desk and your messy dorm room. Right,
if you're, say, middle of semester, and you want the
paper from last night that you were working on, they'll
be at the top of the stack. And if you
(18:15):
want something from the first week at the semester, probably
at the bottom of the stack. Okay, unless of course,
are clean enough to actually move these things and disturb them.
But if you leave them piling up, that's what the
rock record does. And so we can get the relative
asi of things. We've known the relative asi of things
basically since the fifteen sixteen hundreds. Now these things are
younger than those things and so on, without numbers attached
to any of it. And then the numbers really didn't
(18:37):
come along until the early twentieth century, and really not
until the nineteen fifties. So they became widely available on
a large of different kinds of rocks when Potts smart
on dating came along. So that's how you do it.
And then so for example, we knew the sequence of
fossils in the rocks like trilobites from the Cambrian and
things like that, and they have names which were given
to them before we knew any numbers. So Cambrian was
(18:59):
a DeFi fin term of relative age defined on certain fossils,
usually before we had any idea how long ago the
Camerian was. And with all guests work until the early
twentieth century. And then along came volcanic cash dating of
these layers in the Cambrian and we be able to
start doing this and eventually, you know, we now have
it very well refined, although it changes all the time too.
(19:21):
That's another thing people in craazious community can't get used to,
is that science changes, science revises, science updates, and so
you look at any timescale and you find it's the numbers.
Everything else shifted a couple of million years here or
there all the time. That's because we keep getting better dates.
So since we get better dates, we change the timescale
a little bit. And that's the way it's supposed to work, right.
(19:42):
You don't stick with old numbers just because they're sacred. Okay,
you update the numbers as soon as you get better numbers.
And so one of the reasons I don't bother it
till you actually memorize too many of the numbers in
the timescale that they're almost always out of date by
the time you want to use them again. And that's okay.
We all carry around that version of the timescale on
our head, and then I can have a handy time
scale life. I want to look up specific numbers I
(20:04):
don't keep in my head.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
So I Since truth be told, we're all about paranormal
ancient civilizations and stuff like that. When you let's say
you go to Egypt and you go to the Great Pyramid.
When does when you cut a rock, does that change
anything about the the finding of the age of that
(20:31):
rock from the cut or does it always stay the same?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
No, Well, it take a limestone block in the Great Pyramid.
First of all, you can't do that with radiometric dating
because it's said, merry, it's a limestone. So they're the
way you would date that rock. In fact, you can
date that rock this way is by looking at the
fossils there in it. And the limestones that make up
the pyramids are full of these little coin sized things
(20:56):
called nemilitis, which were so which would make my single
cell organ. But some of them the size of a
quarter the shell they secreted as they grew, and they
make up almost all those Geesea limestones there from what
they're called Middle eas Scene now and so they actually
tell us those right locks were originally formed in the
Middle as Scene and a shallow sea that ran all
the way from Gibraltar to Indonesia so called tedthy seaway uh.
(21:19):
And then so that tells you what age of the rock is.
That nothing you do to it other than cutting it
will change anything about it, and cutting it doesn't change stage.
And of course the age of when they're cut and
put up by ancient Egyptians is yet another much younger
of it. Neither one of those are of relevant or
radio dat You can't do it date rocks like that.
And again it's yet to know what you're doing and
(21:40):
know where it's appropriate.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Now that because I've I've talked to many theories, many
people about theories about the age of the Great Pyramid,
and I've heard.
Speaker 2 (21:52):
Oh, yeah, there's a whole cult following it.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yeah, yeah, So I didn't. I didn't know if that
was something that would change.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Is that there's nothing thing you do to a limestone
it would change its numerical age. And the limestone self
has no radioactive elements in it, so it can never
have been dated that way anyway. It's only age is
determined by what fossils it contains. And it turns out
the whole limestone is made of fossils. That's what they
are to be like. By nature, limestones are formed by
fossil shells, and this case particular couper shells called umilities.
(22:21):
Tell Us is middle easying about fifty million years old.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
How would you, as an archaeologist determine the age of
the actual pyramid versus the limestone itself.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Well, whenever you can. The thing you look for is
something that will have organic carbon in it. And a
lot of the structures in ancient Egypt are not just
made of limestone, have wood and other things, are sometimes
charcoal and embedded with the known deposits of a certain
archaeological age. And if you have carbon, whether it's a
pharmaceay with charcoal or hearth, or lots of pottery for example,
(22:56):
is got carbon in its las and elsewhere in it,
so it's it's datable shell fragments from the recent but
most often its wooding and charcoal. As long as they're
not older than fifty thousand years ago, they can be
radiocarbonated and there they're reasonably good shape. And all Egyptian
society doesn't go back more than about eleven eight nine
(23:16):
thousand years ago at the outside, depending on who you
talk to, So they're all within the range of radio carbon.
That's where the numerica ages of Egyptian chronology have come from.
Once you know the sequence of events in Egyptian history,
and especially if good ig geotologists can read hieroglyphics and
recognize certain styles, you know pretty tightly when it, which
dynasty occurred, which pharaoh was there in power, and then
(23:40):
you can just go back to chronology. It's been done
on radio carbon of wood and others structures. Not in
its pyramids, not that much wood in them, but most
of the structures that were built about the same time do.
Speaker 1 (23:51):
Yeah, that's I've never been. I've always wanted to go.
But have you been to Egypt since I've been there? Yeah,
So I'm going to go kind of go back with
the science in religion where the in misunderstanding about the
Earth's age. How does these misunderstandings of the age of
(24:14):
the Earth affect people's grasp on such things as evolution,
climate change, and other scientific issues.
Speaker 2 (24:24):
It's part of a larger piece the puzzle, which is
denying science whenever your religion and your faith demands you
do so. And you know, I actually wrote a different
book than the evolution book, or a different book called
a Reality Check about Science Niles and way back the
harmless days of g George W. Bush for science Now
became a major party platform and tried to argue and
(24:48):
it's still, of course true, just worse than it's ever
been that science Nile is a bad thing for the
country and for the world. And it comes to lots
of forms, right, Denying climate change means that the planet's
already changing and we could every year. So you know,
the age of the Earth is something that doesn't make
you feel secure and comfortable that the humans and the
center thinks. There's where we come in with this topic,
(25:08):
is that you know, the understanding the science of the
age of the Earth and the Earth's history and of
course evolution, those do not make humans the center of
the universe. But we've known that for a very long time,
ever since we discovered we were a tiny little planet
on a minor soular system and a very far our
edge of one galaxy out of millions of galaxies. Humans
ego has been beaten down for ever most four years
(25:32):
now thanks to science efic discoveries. So the usual practice
for people who are about their religious fundamentalists especially is
to reject anything that tells them what they don't want
to hear. And they're entitled to that, of course, but
they miss out on the other side of it, which
is this glorious world of science and what we now
understand that we did not understand a few hundred years ago,
(25:54):
what doesn't give us a secure anth percentric humans are
all important view of the world, but it does give
us a world view that is satisfying, because every time
we test against reality, it turns out to be correct.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Yeah, and I know it's so important to learn about
history biblically and also with science. I think it's something
that we shouldn't separate because it's very important.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
There are plenty of people managed to do this right.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
My good friend, the late Stephen J. Gould, who is
a very prominent panaeontologist by generation ahead of me, famously
called it non overlapping magisteria, which is this fancy of
saying religion has its domain. Do you know it does
things like makes for pronouncements on culture and pronouncements on
spirituality and pronouncements on morality. Whether or not you accept
(26:48):
that is another issue. And it isn't supposed to be
messing around with things like science, which we've only had
learned in the last four and years, and we were
not going back to Stone age beliefs about the world,
a priest on age belief about the world. Actually, so
there's you know, there are two worlds, and they don't
ness that to conflict if you don't take the Bible
(27:09):
literally and believing if someone has read the Bible in
both Greek and Hebrew. It's not possible to take it
literally because you discover once you're reading the original out
full of flaws and mistakes and corrections and all the
other things are in there. You can't, especially if the
King James version, which is the worst translation, availed.
Speaker 1 (27:24):
So uh, well, before we get out of here, I
do have a couple more questions about what advice would
you give students and educators that are going into the
field of science where they're caught in between the scientific
evidence and religious pressure. What what would you your years
(27:45):
of experience, especially in the current environment.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Basically, you just got to do what you can to
keep up with what's going on in sciences. Right, so
if you're teaching science or working in sciences, you do
all you can to find out what the latest ideas are,
the latest discoveries are, the latest data are, and that
applies things like understanding Earth history or newest information about
the date of some event. Those are things suspicious geologists
(28:12):
which we get to keep track of. And then it's
up to you personally how much this does or does
not affect your religious morality whatever you want to call it.
Part of the world you know that a lot of
people are devoutly religious them A number of my friends
are good Christians, especially good Catholics, have no problems with
doing that and still being top rons panetologists. There's no
(28:34):
inherent contradiction in being a religious person and being scientific,
as long as you don't have for the two of
them messing around in each other's backyards. Right, You just
don't let religion mess around something it's not qualified to
tell you, and that especially includes things about science. You
can believe all you want to believe about non scientific issues.
That science is based on a reality. It's external to us,
(28:57):
and you can try to deny it all you like,
but it just keeps on coming back. You know it's true,
whether or not you believe it.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Well, what strategies have you found most effective in presenting
these complex scientific evidence and too nonscience people.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
Well, most of the time I'm dealing with a college
student audience or you know, public audience. I don't attack
religion directly, because that's not a strategy, you know. I
just play laid out plain as simple as we did
today about what we know and what we think we know.
We I'm not sure of you know, I'm being very
honest where our data come from and where we don't
yet have good data. That's the way all sciences have
(29:37):
to be that through tentative they have to be honest
with their limitations. I mean, now, we're never absolutely fun,
you know about we are sure of something on hundred
percent that doesn't work. In science, everything has probabilities. And
most of the time I don't tread over on the
other side because it's not relevant. You know, it's not
an issue. When I'm taking a teacher class science students
at a cause level, I don't normally bring the religion
(29:59):
up at all, and I don't really don't get asked,
although I don't see them in person much anymore thanks
to COVID, But when I had in person classes, I
rarely I hardly can remember any instance of creation just
trying to challenge me or raise this issue. Now there
are exceptions, and the main thing I could think I
was on the earliest part of my teaching career when
I taught in Knox College in Gilsburg, Illinois. That's why
(30:21):
I was the Dowastaded, Illinois coordinator for the ill Music Correspondence.
I decided to tackle the problem head on and what
I did is, since this is a liberal arts college,
it's a little tiny college for Knox College in Gilsburg
and lay a liberal arts college where they wanted interdiment courses.
I did a class called Science, Creation and the Cosmos,
and so it had a little bit of cosmology, a
(30:44):
lot of methods and philosophy of science, a little foundation
of where evolution near body comes from the evidence that
supports it. And then I actually went into the history
of creationism and how they developed, because I am pretty
well read in that and what I knew about the
Bible from my own direct reading of it in the
original language. So by the time we actually talked about
a modern American creationism of the late twentieth century, like
(31:07):
Week seven, they were much more sophisticated than most college
students are in all these topics. And then I actually
threw it in, threw it out to them to do
the battle themselves. So I actually had the two divide
up the whole class about seventy into ten groups of seven,
and then one day we had a series of five
minute debates on the stage to show them number one
(31:28):
that debates are a terrible way to decide to sign
an issue. But what it has showed is that in
a debate format, creationists can give you some simplistic, one
dimensional argument that in fact assumes the wrong thing or
is it false to begin with in its premises, and
it's very hard for an evolutionist to handle them. And
ever in the room, by this point I understood that
creationism was garbage, and they could see this happening. The
(31:50):
debate was winnable for criatis because the format works that way,
and especially if the creationists is framing it in their terms,
then the scientist has to do a lot of backtracking
to expl blame where they're wrong. And the only time
I ever saw these scientific argument won by the other
side was the when the creation has put out their proposition.
These are all, by the way, the standards, ten or
(32:11):
so arguments the creationists keep using over a century now.
They all have been debunked a thousand times, but they
never stop using them. Uh. And someone in the creationists
debate thing got up and said, of some particular argument
and they're cut off by the other side. That stopped
right there. Your premise is wrong, and the debate that's it.
If you give them the opportunity to frame it in
(32:32):
their form. When I debated, gave duayensh this is what
he does. He flrows out one lie after one misconception,
after one distortion after another straw man, and you as
a you're on the defense. As a scientist, you can't
undo the damage as quickly as they can do it.
And we now see this, by the way in modern politics,
where certain politicians annoying throwing lies at you and another
(32:52):
drop stream and you just can't keep up with all
the things that you know are wrong with it, and
then people just sort of fold and give up. So
theh gallop is still a very popular political strategy. You know,
one politician particular is famous or just spearing lives and
misconceptions right and left. I won't name them, but you
can probably guess what you mean.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
Is that a debate that you did? Is it on video?
Speaker 2 (33:14):
No? It was eight So somewhere in my boxes and
the garage, I have a few audio recordings I would
love to hear. I gave us set to the NCSC
when I was a I could find them, but I
don't know where they are anymore. It was a four
hour debate.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
Uh yeah, And it was at Purdue University on a
Saturday night, and the Creation is the course organized it.
The guy who ran it was an engineer at Purdue UH.
And they set it up so that you know, it
was Saturday night, big in a big ten university. Nobody's
going to show up except religious people, right because there's
so many a Saturday night at Purdue campus. And so
what we ended up with was a giant room full
(33:51):
of all these church people that have been bust in
from all over Indiana for this event because Creations are
well organized. And me and five students who rode with me,
Allish Mill. That was my total support system.
Speaker 1 (34:03):
You're a beasts. He's going in that room.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Yeah, I knew that it was gonna be. The best
I could do for is a draw. You can't win
these debates because they won't concede anytime that you right way.
And they're not fair debates because there's no moderator to
tell the lucretion is you just made a mistake here
or you just got beaten here. It's not a true
debate like you do in say high school or college
for instance. What they did was that they set it
(34:28):
up and luckily I won the coin toss so I
got the first and the third half hour of the
first two hours.
Speaker 1 (34:33):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Then a week beforehand, I went to watch Dwayne Gish
give the same exact speech. And you were sit to
Illinois Champagne or Banna, so you're ready an unopposed lecture
of the sand election. It's always the same lecture. His
code ecxillies are all faded pink by this point, and
it's always the same order with the same punchlines. And
so I watched him do this in general audience where
(34:54):
they didn't charge money, and he got booed and heckled
a lot by the intergial noise students. They weren't being
busted from churches. These were real students. So but I
got to see his slide order, and so I knew
he wouldn't change a thing. He never listens to his pony,
never changes the thing. He just a robot, or used
to be a robot, does the same thing over and
over again. So then I made his point in my
(35:15):
first half hour of debunking all of his points in
his first half of his slide show before he got
to them. And then the third half hour when I
was up first again, I debunked the second part of
a slide show before he got them. He didn't change
a thing. He didn't even acknowledge there were people the
audience could see the contradiction, even though because I had
pointed out when I said these things, he's going to
(35:36):
say this and he will not admit this, and they
caught it, and he didn't. You know, he doesn't listen
to his opponent. He doesn't answer the pony.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
So I just wanted to hear himself.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
As a debate goes. I had at least speaken him
to a draw by the end of two hours, But
that's going back to one of the original points. After
the break, you know, after two hours we were finally
given a break. They gave us a stack of a
little three by five indix cards which questions the audience,
and this standard question was for both of us to
answer on the top. But then belief that were the
(36:07):
questions that was sent to me from the audience, and
it was all about are you homosexual? Are you an adulter?
Or are you going to hell? There was not a
single science question anywhere in that because they don't give
a damn about science.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Right, I was going to say lives.
Speaker 2 (36:21):
Better and means they have things like devices like this
in their possession. But they this was all about you know,
salvation and faith, and you know, that's all they cared about.
They didn't care that. You know, I'm talking to science
for two hours and they don't listen to any of it.
Speaker 1 (36:35):
So that, honestly, when when they know a lot of people,
when they know they're beaten, they go for the yeah,
the being personal, yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Yeah, yeah, And in this case, it's very much about
your religious beliefs or sex life, your or sex orientation.
You know. There were some jokes and good kishes, standard talk,
which I knew exactly when they were coming and what
they were. Like, you show a slide of a chimpanzee.
What did that picture my grandson do getting in there?
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Yeah, so he used the same thing.
Speaker 2 (37:05):
I like, gish, who's mocking the idea that related to apes?
But I was like a twenty five year old college professor,
you know, single, and I'm clearly not old enough to
have a grandson. There's no way I could steal that joke, right,
it makes sense to do it. It was possible, and
I was tempted to do it, but it didn't make
sense to me.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
Did do that, so well, you're going to have to
find that audio. But before before we go, I know
you have talked about writing books because I'm all about UFOs,
I'm all about bigfet I'm all about that stuff. You
actually wrote a book about the UFOs, and I kind
of want to just touch briefly on your theory because
(37:44):
people that listen to Truth be Told definitely want to
know what science says about extraterrestrials.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
Oh, that's exactly what the title of the book is.
It's called UFOs, Ken Trails and Aliens. What science says.
There we go, and I came out a few years ago.
My Tim Callahan, my co author, and I wrote a
few years ago won an award for the Outstanding Science
Book and the Group of the Group of Committee for
Science a Bad Investigations, So I have that work behind
me actually. But anyway, basically the evidence is there is
(38:15):
no evidence, okay, as in, eyewitness testimony is completely useless
because humans are terrible video recorders and misremember and mis
interpret everything we see. So you have to have hard
physical evidence. Well, the hard physical evidence is also non existent.
It comes becast mostly of things that are completely interpreted wrong.
(38:37):
People will talk about, for example, Area fifty one. My
dad worked for Lockey his whole career. He was at
Area fifty one. Oh wow, And yes, well he was
still active at Lockey until before he retired. He helped
build the SR setting on Blackbird, which is the spy
plane that was probably the basis for a lot of
the UFO sightings that happened in the fifties and sixties.
(38:57):
Were many. When you know, the thing that was built
like you know, so a flying saucer, and it traveled
at Mock three at ten hundred thousand feet high above airliners,
so commercial airliners wouldn't have any idea what it was
because it was top secret anyway. And so when he
was there, you know, there was nothing much more than
it was a top secret spy airplane base where they
(39:18):
tested spycraft. And they did put it there deliberately. I've
been just as close as you can be to it,
but of course you can't go past security perimeter. They
put it there so you could not observe it from
the ground level anywhere. It's completely surrounded by mountains that
are held in the security perimeter, and until satellites came along,
nobody could see at any other angle you couldn't fly
over it or anything like that. It was designed back
(39:38):
in trol that aft World War two. Basically he did
test spiplanes. So they did the stealth bomber there, or
a self fighter there which my dad worked on as well. Wow.
Or that they did the U two which my dad
worked on. And so he was there on the Janet flights.
They're called out of Vegas a couple of times, and
he was never allowed to talk about this until shortly
before he passed away. And that point all the security
(39:58):
restrictions had been lifted on the people who work for
something contractors like Lockie did built up there. And in
that point he also told me, I think we were
watching late night show about some UFO thing and they
talked about Aaron fifty one. He was laughing his head
off because he was actually a witness, and he said,
this is all garbage.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Well, I'm going by that length if you all do
another show, So.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
I'm going to have you back for that. But I'm
sure some people are very disappointed to hear that.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
Well, if you look online, I have a ted talk
only eighteen minutes long. The whole essence of y UFOs
are not real. Well they're unidentified, but they're not.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
Any that's right, right, Okay, So last question before we
I know you're busy man, and you know, getting back
to doing what you do. But what if you could
go back in time? And this is just kind of
a fun question. If you can go back in time
and the time machine any moment in Earth's history, what
(40:56):
what going clear back to four point five billion era
would you pick? And why.
Speaker 2 (41:03):
I'm actually at first it works on sevens like mammals
from the last sixty six million years and the interval
time I've spent the most working on is a period
called the East and Oligacy, which is around thirty seven
to around thirty million years ago, which is the kind
of fossils you find, examples the Big Badland South Dakota.
That the best places to see fossils like that. So
I've studied all the fossils out that that time and place.
(41:25):
So I found a time machine. I go back to the
Big batter than South Dakota thirty million years ago. The
cool animals they had then are no less interesting me
than dinosaurs are to other people. You know, I've worked
on dinosaurs too, and that was how I got started peneonology,
but I'm a fossil mammal person now. Currently my main
focus is American fossil camels, which I'm just about twelve.
(41:46):
It's a big book on it. So behind me there
on my left, on my right left as you view
me on the screen, there that's a giant draft like
camel which I've worked on. So that book is supposed
to come out this fall American Fossil Camels.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
So that would be pretty I would I mean work.
Speaker 2 (42:01):
Done rhinos in a bunch of other American fossils too, so.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
That would be great. And if take me with you
because I wouldn't mind seeing that era too. So well,
how do people find you? Are you on Instagram? You
have a website or.
Speaker 2 (42:14):
Yeah, I have an Instagram site. I just type in
my name, Donald Prothero. It'll be the first hit. I
have a website, although it's currently down. I got to
get it back up again. Mostly just has links to
all my publications. The main thing is that if you
really wanted to learn something, I have a YouTube channel.
Oh yeah, call Prehistoric Parade if you type in prehistoric
(42:34):
Parade and then my last named Prothero Prehistoric parade. Any
version of that, you'll see. I released a YouTube video
once a week since over a year ago. Now, wow,
each one is about five to ten minutes long, and
it's about some aspect of the fossil record, usually evolution
of whales, evolution of horses, evolution of rhyano's, evolution to elephants,
all these things we know so much about. So it's
(42:55):
lucky to focused on fossil mammals. But that's what I
know the best. And but I have got other topics
in there as well. And so if you go to
pre to start pray and you'll find I've got a
ton of these videos all posted. I've got to get
some new ones up pretty soon because I haven't done
any since I did a lot of museum travel and
so on this last couple of months.
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Well, hopefully people will go over and support you and
thank you for writing all the books and doing what
you do. And I always say I have great respect
for people that go to school and do the research
that we don't do. We just learn from you, so
you'll always be professor.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
That's what the books are for. Yep.
Speaker 1 (43:36):
So all right, well, thank you so much, and thank
you everybody for joining us and we hope that you
enjoyed it. Please come back every Friday for truth be
told with me Tony Sweet and here on the club,
here and amal on Network. Until next time, take care
of yourself and each other. Bye,
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