Episode Details

No, humans did not arise out of apes. We arose out of fish! And we bear many scars and souvenirs from that journey.

Yes, again!  We are indeed talking about Young Earth Creationism again, because folks: YECism is alive and well in large swathes of Western society. And they’re building a giant cultural silo — their own school systems (from junior kindergarten to university), publishing houses, media and news networks, TV and radio stations — to perpetuate the continuation of this anti-science / science-denialist worldview.

In this episode, Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray unveils her latest book — her third — which focuses on one of the most forbidden topics for Fundamentalists and YECists: human evolution. In it, she traces the journey that we humans have been on: from fish to us.  And along the way, she pauses to look closely at some of the major tripping points: Concordism … the Cambrian explosion … Intelligent Design … embryology … genetics … endogenous retroviral scars … the image of God … and so much more. We also spend a fair bit of time talking about a variety of aspects of human physiology and dysfunction which can be traced back to our fish-y ancestry:

• the “design” of the Fallopian tubes, and ectopic pregnancies;

• the translocation of the testes, and males being prone to hernias;

• a particular nerve which took a very short and direct route to the fish’s gills, but needs to go on a long and convoluted detour in mammals;

• another nerve which triggered a breathing reflex in fish, but triggers hiccups in humans;

• human embryos initially forming gills and tails, but then re-shaping those into other structures;

• the general structure of fish fins and mammal limbs.

She left us with lots to think about. We highly recommend this book.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find out more about Dr. Janet Kellogg Ray and her books at her Eerdmans web-page.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy several of our previous episodes collected thematically under “Human Evolution“, or Luke’s book on Human Evolution.