Evolution 2.0

In four years, my younger brother Bryan went from seminary grad and missionary in China to the doorstep of atheism - and he was dragging me with him. This was an earthquake for everyone in my family, because we’re pastor’s kids. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Because I’m an Electrical Engineer, I decided to let science decide this for me: Does nature really point us to atheism? Or does science favor faith? Darwinian theory is consistently challenged by doctors and engineers. Does that mean the engineers know something the biologists don’t? Or do the biologists know something the engineers don’t know? I resolved to find out. And I also encountered strong evidence for an evolutionary history of the earth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

My first business was building stereo equipment and I was selling my brand in a retail store when I was 17. Later I worked in manufacturing, acoustics, and digital networking. What does engineering tell us about evolution?  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

100 years ago, biologists discovered they could generate DNA mutations with radiation, which was easy to do. They were excited because they believed they could now accelerate evolution. They tried experiments with fruit flies for decades. They learned a great deal about which genes perform certain functions… but as far as generating evolutionary events, those experiments were a total failure. There had to be something more to evolution that we didn’t understand. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I had a huge epiphany when I realized that everything I knew about 1s and 0s as a communication engineer applied to DNA. This sliced through a LOT of nonsense a lot of people were spouting about evolution. It also indicated who I could safely listen to and what I was likely to find as I dug deeper. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A friend accidentally meets the inventor of digital imaging in an Oregon coffee shop, and the world’s first digital photo is Russell Kirsch’s son Walden in 1957. This sparks insight into the early history of life. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Barbara McClintock discovered corn plants can re-program their own DNA in 1944. But her colleagues thought she was crazy so she took her work underground for 20 years. But she won the Nobel Prize in 1983. Turns out nearly every cell in existence can cut, splice, and re-arrange its DNA - reprogramming itself when times get tough. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Creationists say evolution has never been observed and cannot create new species. But if you know what to do, you can make new species at will with hybrids. A major blade in the evolutionary Swiss army knife. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How to win the Evolution 2.0 Prize. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Referred to as “Science’s Unruly Earth Mother”, a “vindicated heretic”and a “scientific rebel”, Lynn Margulis was an American evolutionary theorist, biologist, and science author. She was the primary modern proponent for symbiosis in evolution.Throughout her career, Margulis’ work aroused intense objection (one grant application elicited the response, “Your research is crap, do not bother to apply again”,) and her formative paper, “On the Origin of Mitosing Cells,” appeared in 1967 – after being rejected by numerous journals.Her papers are now permanently archived in the Library of Congress, and she is considered to be one of the 20th century’s most important inspirational leaders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.