The Eric Metaxas Show - Eric Cassell

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

Eric Cassell details the fascinating, even miraculous, lives of animals, birds, reptiles, and insects, with fun facts found in his book, "Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts." (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m. Investments.com. That's LegacyPMinvestments.com. Eric McTaxis show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey there, folks. Some of you saw me recently talking about my book, Is Atheism Dead? I was on Tucker Carlson's program. and on the program I said that I had just been reading a book I couldn't remember the title

the title is Animal Algorithms The subtitle is Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts. What I said on Tucker's program which I'll repeat now was that it's one of the most amazing books I've ever read and if you ever needed proof that there isn't the ghost of a chance

that all animal life evolved through random mutations, this is front and center. It is truly one of the most amazing things I have read. I said, wouldn't it be great to get the author on the program? And, you know, whenever you want to get the author on the program, you're afraid somebody's going to say, oh, I'm sorry, he passed away in 1946. That's not going to be possible.

Well, in this case, it's very possible. he's very much alive and well and he is the author of Animal Algorithms and my guest today Eric Castle or is it Cassell. Welcome to the program. Thanks Eric, yeah, it is Castle. Castle. That's great to be with me. Your book is a big deal

and anything published by Discovery I'm already excited about but what you talk about in this book it's a little difficult for me to describe so I'll let you take a crack at it first But before we get into what the book is about, what is your background? If somebody says to you, other than writing this book, what do you do? Because you have a kind of a complex history.

Sure. I'm primarily an engineer. That's my profession. But I have some other background that, at least I think in many ways, makes me qualified to write the book. I also have a degree in biology, and I also have a master's degree in science and religion from Biola University, which was very instrumental in helping me to have the proper background to write this book. So kind of taking a big picture look at it, the way that I approached the book is I was trying to, to combine my engineering expertise with my knowledge of biology and try to look at certain

aspects, particularly these animal behaviors that I talk about in a sort of a holistic manner in the way to combine the engineering with the biology. Okay, well, let me translate this for the layman. Animals do amazing things. some of them do things that are so amazing that if your jaw doesn't drop open, you're not paying attention. One of the things animals do, and you describe it right in the beginning of your book, they migrate. And I think, you know, we all kind of think, oh, that's interesting. A bee, which has a brain, the size of a grain of sand, is able to do this very, very complex migration and collecting pollen and on and on and on.

It's fascinating. And we normally go, well, that's interesting. Nature is fascinating. But you have actually studied this kind of thing. And as you write about it, I was more and more in awe of what it is that these animals do. And the thesis to me is that there's no question that this can't just happen. The first part, just from the first page of the book, you say a bee brain has one thousandth of one percent, Not 1,000th, 1,000th of 1%.

So 100,000th of the neurons found in the human brain. And you talk about what a bee does. You talk about monarch butterfly. This is the one that killed me, and I want you to respond to this one. You say monarch butterflies migrate annually two to three thousand miles between Canada and Mexico. Anybody's ever looked at the head of a monarch butterfly. They're exceedingly tiny, tiniest brains imaginable. You write that it takes up to three generations of butterflies to complete the journey,

suggesting the knowledge of the migration route is innate rather than learned. Each generation of monarchs has a clear goal for its segment of the annual migration. And again, this takes more than one generation. And then you say the accuracy, this is the showstopper, the accuracy of their now. Navigation is such that they often spend the winter in Mexico in the same tree as their predecessors. That's just page one of animal algorithms. Were you astonished to find some of these things, or did you already know this? I mean, because it is so fascinating.

I hardly know where to begin except to read page one. Well, yeah, I was astonished. When I first started looking into this quite some time ago, navigation aspect of it, I was initially familiar with birds. And the bird navigation alone surprised me very much because having worked on aircraft navigation systems, that was my initial work that I did in my engineering profession. So I was very familiar with how aircraft systems are designed to navigate. And then when I started learning about birds and amazing feats that birds are able to accomplish in their navigation and migration, that's what got me started on it. But then when you started, I started looking at other animals, particularly insects like monarch butterflies,

it's even more astonishing because birds we know are actually fairly intelligent animals and can do some pretty amazing things because they are surprisingly intelligent. But in the case of other animals, particularly insects that have, as you indicated, such tiny brains, these are minuscule brains. But yet they're able to accomplish these amazing feats of navigation. and as I looked into it more and more, it's just astonishing the amount of design and engineering that's embedded in these particular animals. But what you seem to say, what you do say in the book is that it makes zero logical sense

to think that these tiny, tiny, tiny insect brains could have evolved. In other words, it seems much clearer that they were designed like a circle. is designed because this is all they do. They don't have the capacity to do much more and, oh, this is one of the things that they do. At least that's what I read. That's actually a very good analogy, a circuit. Now, part of the problem is we don't know a lot about how their brains are actually designed. but the issue is that because they are so small,

but yet they still have this capability, we know that the term that's used in neuroscience is a neural network, basically which just refers to a network of neurons, which is what brains are primarily composed of, but they must have extremely sophisticated neural networks that have this information designed into them. And the other aspect of it's because their brains are so tiny, the programming and design of their neural networks

is just astonishingly efficient because they are so small. To encode all of this information into these brains and function in the way that they do, is just amazingly efficient. You talk on one of the first pages also, I mark these things about termites. I mean, you know, when we think of a termite,

termite brain, you know, people often say, hey, you know, hey, bird brain, that's an insult. A termite brain is so much smaller than a bird brain. It's almost unimaginable. And you say they construct nests that have impressed. I mean, actually, I'm going to pause. When we come back, I want to read this paragraph. The book is Animal Algorithms, Evolution, and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts by Eric Castle.

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I had the joy recently of getting a new book called Animal Algorithms, Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts by Eric Castle. Now, a lot of these books are not that much fun to read. This is fun to read. It's absolutely fascinating. And I just marked a few things. So I'm talking to Eric Castle, the author right now. On page 17, you say some species of termite.

construct nests that have impressed architects, engineers, and artists alike. And again, when we think of a tiny a termite is in the size of their brain, this is crazy. The nests of these termites can reach more than 20 feet high and typically include a royal chamber, nurseries, gardens, waste dumps, a well, and a ventilation system. that reduces heat and removes carbon dioxide. Anybody who is not amazed by that, as I say, is not paying attention or is not very bright, because that is just astonishing. In the past, I think people would have said, wow, God is amazing.

Look what God does. God creates these creatures. But if you don't have God as a potential thesis or hypothesis to explain this, what does science say can make this possible or do they say very much? Well, I mean, again, the reigning paradigm in science in terms of the origin of all organisms and every aspect of it is Darwinian evolution. So that's the fundamental basis for how to explain things in, in biology.

Well, but that's just a term. In other words, I expect them to say, oh, it's obviously, you know, survival of the fittest, or we never know that. Like, we know that. But he'd say, okay, given that, tell me, how do you get from nothing to these brilliant termites given random mutations, you know, in the course of the eons? I don't know. Has anybody taken a good crack at that?

Because I don't know how they would. Well, in terms of some of the behaviors that I discuss in the book, there really are not any theories out there. In other words, some of the aspects of this, particularly things like the navigation abilities of some of these animals, haven't really been investigated in great detail in terms of trying to provide a reasonable Darwinian type of explanation. And part of that reason is because some of the information in the book is actually fairly recent. There's been quite a bit of research done, again, on navigation systems and animals within the last 20 years or so, I would say, 20 to 30 years. Other aspects, scientists are just learning about some of these amazing abilities.

So part of the reason is because the information hasn't been out there for very long, and so biologists haven't really tried to explain their origins. But on the other hand, that sort of the fallback for anything like this is it has to be Darwinian, evolution. But I have to get credit to Steve Meyer of discovery because he's been tackling these issues for about 20 years in his books. And he didn't particularly address animal behavior. That hasn't up until my book was put out. Nobody had really talked a whole lot about animal behavior in this regard. But Steve Myers' work on the DNA, origin of life,

the Cambrian explosion, the origin of the animal design, all of that. He provided a lot of evidence that Darwinian evolution is totally inadequate to explain those things. And a lot of it has to do with the inability, or really, I should say the inability of Darwinian evolution. evolution to explain novel biological characteristics. In other words, novel new body types.

And in my case that I, the behaviors that I talk about is novel behaviors. In other words, behaviors that appear to arise in animals without a whole lot of, without a way of explaining them as having occurred in the past. In other words, there isn't a logical step-by-step appearance of these behaviors over time. They just seem to appear out of nowhere without a whole lot of evolutionary background. Right, that's the problem, which leads most people, most people who aren't ideologically bound to say the reason that happens is because they do come out of nowhere. In other words, the idea that we have to assume a series of steps, but we can't even conceive of those steps.

I mean, my theory after reading your book is that the reason people have not tackled this stuff is because they're smart enough to know that they don't want to waste their entire career going nowhere. It strikes me that you could spend your whole career looking into this, the way people have tried to, you know, convince us that you go from the primordial soup to amino acids to whoop, whoop, whoop, and then we get cells. People have spent 70 years trying and have gotten nowhere. And this to me seems on that level. I mean, I want to read again on page 23 already. You say, you're quoting Darwin. Darwin says that man, we cannot on his first trial make a stone hatchet or a canoe. He has to learn this work by practice.

A beaver, on the other hand, can make its dam or canal and a bird its nest as well or nearly as well, and a spider its wonderful web, quite as well, the first time it tries as when old and experienced. I don't know how anybody could fail to be astonished by that, anybody who has looked at a beaver dam. the level of engineering, it's nothing less than astonishing. And I think it does, it comes as close to impossible as it can come to try to imagine how beavers over generations could have created something like that. In other words, it doesn't seem logical. Yeah, and that's sort of a basic issue here. I will say in terms of animals like bees,

behaviors. They're mammals that are fairly intelligent and they are capable of learning quite a bit. But they do exhibit behaviors that don't appear to require a lot of learning. On the other hand, what I was trying to focus on in the book are animals in particular, in the case of insects, that again have such tiny brain that they don't have a lot of brain capacity and they don't show a a whole, a large potential for learning. They do actually have some learning capability with some basic behaviors. But the point is that many of the behaviors that, at least the ones I talk about in the book, these are not learned behaviors. They're entirely programmed. In other words, they're typically we would call them instinctual, but, or in other words, they're innate. So

soon as they're born, they have the capability. ability for performing these behaviors. And so that means that these are entirely programmed somehow. Somehow. And it'll all be explained. Just hang on. It's kind of funny to me, really. There's so much in this book that's jaw-dropping.

You talk about mollusks, for the love of Pete. You talk about mollusks, crustaceans, and insects that have a magnetic compass. to determine direction. However they got that, that's astonishing. You write that the neuronal response in the brains of pigeons confirmed that pigeons can detect the three characteristics of magnetic fields, direction, intensity, and polarity. These are pigeons with bird brains,

and even in the bird world, pigeons aren't that smart. But just the level of complexity that, that we find in some of these animals. You also write bees. This one kills me. Bees, in fact, have added a processing trick that allows them to guess the sun's azimuth. Can you explain what an azimuth is before we fully appreciate this? Well, what's going on there is that we have known for a while now that some animals, including bees,

are able to use the sun as a form of a compass. In other words, when we think of compass, we think of using the magnetic characteristics of the earth and basically the North Pole points to magnetic north. But in the case of, in this example, bees use the sun as a form of a compass. But we have to keep in mind, And in order to do that and understand the proper direction that you're trying to fly or travel,

you have to take into account the fact that the sun is moving through the sky throughout the day. We're going to go to a break and we're going to follow up. Folks, this is amazing. Animal Algorithms is the book. My Pillow is having their biggest sheet sale of the year. You've all helped build my pillow into the amazing company it is today. Now Mike Lindell, Inventor and CEO wants to give back exclusively. to his listeners, the per kale bed sheet set is available in a variety of colors and sizes, and they're all on sale. For example, the queen's size, regularly priced at 89.99 is now only

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Folks, I'm talking about that a castle, who's the author of a book called Animal Algorithms, incredibly fascinating. We're just talking about the fact that, according to your book, Eric, you say that bees are able to guess the sun's azimuth, that they are, bees are using the sun to navigate. But you say that apparently bees and ants can manage the necessary computations to do this since it's been shown that they still know the son's position even when it is not directly visible. So how can a bee or an ant know where the sun is if they can't see it, even with their tiny brains and eyes? So the way they're doing that apparently, and again, this is something we don't fully understand, but there's enough information to know they are doing this. They have an algorithm that's programmed into their brain

so that they can know the actual location of the sun throughout the day. And then they take that into account when they observe the position of the sun. They know where it actually is. Asmuth, when I use the term azmuth, that's a technical term for just the angle of the sun any time during the day and then when they're trying to fly a certain direction, let's say they're trying to fly northeast. Well, they detect, they know the position of the sun where it should be, and then they know the fact that what the time of day it is, let's say it's 2 p.m.

They know at 2 p.m. the sun is located in a certain location laterally, and then they use that information to compute the path that they want to fly, let's say, northeast. That's a pretty sophisticated mathematical trick and algorithm in the brain of a bee. But what makes it even funnier, as amazing as that is, is that you have strict Darwinians would say, oh, and by the way, they just evolved this level of complex programming. And I'm just in awe that anybody could even think that that's possible. That really is like finding a... you know, a pocket watch on the beach and saying, oh, look with the sand and the wind created here on the beach. I mean, it's so complex.

You also say that lobsters and mollusks have a built-in map sense. I mean, the idea of a mollusk knowing which way is up, I don't know about you, but I'm impressed. Yeah, so they've found, for example, lobsters are able to, some lobsters that live in certain parts of the Atlantic Ocean, they migrate over time. But they have this built-in map so that they know which direction to move during a particular time of the year as they migrate. So they know that they want to go northeast or whatever the direction might be. they have this built-in map, and they use that to generate the navigation path based on their own compass, which is based on the magnetic detection of the Earth's magnetic field.

The miracle of evolution, but they haven't evolved enough yet to be able to avoid melted butter. I just wanted to throw that in. There are so many things in the book that amazed me. You talk about the Arctic Turn, obviously a bird that engages in long-distance navigation. Manx Shear Waters, some of the names of these birds are beautiful. Manx Shearwaters are shorebirds that migrate between the east coast of South America and several small islands near Wales and Scotland where they breed and raise their young, Besides the long distance, there are several other notable aspects of sheer water migration.

One is that the adults initiate their return flight to South America before the juvenile birds depart. So the young birds must make the journey without any guidance from the adults. This is not uncommon in bird migration, and it means that the information defining the navigation route must be pre-programmed. Again, that is just, it's astonishing to me, absolutely astonishing. Yeah, and that's one of the most amazing things about this that we really don't understand completely how this information is actually programmed into these animals. Again, it is programmed. Presumably, that means it's passed down genetically, so it must reside in the genome in some fashion. and then when the next generation of birds are born,

they already know what directions apply for their migration. And everything about that is hard to explain because it involves, first of all, information. Where does the information even come from? How does it get into the genome if that's where it's located and then it's programmed into their brains? Well, again, it seems to me that the, obvious thesis, the one that seems the most obvious, would be that there's a designer. But obviously,

many people in the scientific community, they cannot abide even considering that thesis. And so I think generally they have to ignore these things because, you know, one could spend one's lifetime looking into this and not getting very far. I mean, you go to some extent because you have a history of studying navigation and as an engineer. But, but, but, you know, some of this stuff just beggars belief. It's so beautiful and so impressive that it's just hard to know what to make of it, except to be in awe of it. We're going to go to another break.

Folks, the book, which I recommend highly, is Animal Algorithms, Evolution, and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts by Eric Castle, C-A-S-E-L-L. We'll be right back. Rocket sled on rails. We tore up all of our swindle sheets. and left them setting on the scales. About the time we hit that shy town, them bears was getting smart. They'd brought up some brilliant work.

Folks, I'm talking to Eric Castle, C-A-S-S-E-L-L. He's the author of Animal Algorithms, full of extraordinary information. Eric, I was just reading here that one species of migratory shorebird breeds in the Arctic regions. It's called the bar-tailed godwit. I love the names of these birds. But you write that there are four subspecies that migrate to different regions with the most interesting being the Alaskan Godwit, which migrates between either New Zealand or Australia in the southern hemisphere

to western Alaska in the northern hemisphere. And this is what kills me. You write, the migratory route consists of a series of non-stop flights, One bar-tailed Godwit that was tagged with a satellite tracking device was recorded flying nonstop for 6,350 miles from New Zealand to China. Then after feeding for five weeks, it flew another 4,013 miles to the Alaska Peninsula. Even more impressively, the same bird flew the return route to New Zealand covering seven. 7,189 miles non-stop in eight days. That's an average speed of about 35 miles per hour for close to 200 hours.

I mean, the book is full of stuff like this, and it just cannot help fill you with awe and wonder at some of these creatures whose names we've never heard before. Yeah, some of those behaviors of particularly these long-distance migrating birds is, like you say, it's pretty amazing. But it's amazing for a number of different reasons. One is the navigation ability that we've already talked about. But the other is the physical capabilities of these birds

to fly thousands of miles nonstop. And what happens is that the birds go through a process prior to migrating. There's a lot of physiological changes. to take place. And one of which is, obviously, they must eat a lot of food to store up enough calories for the journey. It's called carboloading. It's called carboloading.

It's called carboloading. And then there's sort of a switch that goes on in the brain, apparently, where they become solely focused during these three. in these migratory flights, they're so focused on their goal, and it is a goal and their journey, they will ignore everything else that's going on. In other words, for example, they might be hungry, but they don't stop. They just keep flying, and they'll lose a large percentage of their body weight during these journeys. But the fact is that they have this goal, and they're going to complete the goal no matter what. It really is.

It's just extraordinary. Where did you grow up? Were you interested in this as a kid? I would say no. I didn't become that interested in it until after my engineering career had begun. and I just happened to start reading about some of these aspects of bird migration. That was probably the first thing that caught my eye. And I became familiar with that.

And then it was probably a little bit after that that I actually sort of took a break from my engineering career and got my degree in biology. And that's when I started learning a lot more biology and then trying to put two and two together. In other words, when combining my engineering knowledge with what I was learning in biology and becoming amazed at a lot of these different issues. In chapter four, you talk about complex programmed societies,

and then quoting the scripture, you say, consider the ant. You leave off the thou sluggard. But you say, consider the ant, and you say that ants exhibit several, complex behaviors associated with social group lifestyles, including agriculture, territorial wars, slavery, division of labor, casts, consensus building, cities, and a symbolic language. And all of these complex social behaviors appear to be programmed since the ants master the

behaviors almost immediately before there is time to have learned them. Again, this is what stuns me. The idea that ants with brains that are inconceivably small have tremendous hierarchy and complexity in their societies and in their division of labor, often there's just not much more to be done than to be in awe of it. I think you could study this for the rest of your life and just continue to be in awe of it. Oh, exactly. And, yeah, there's biologists who've done that. They've spent their whole career studying these things.

The social insects are really fascinating because in the case of those animals, it's not just an animal exhibiting an individual behavior. They're actually living within a society. that is, as you described, it is very complex. And the ants exhibit a number of different behaviors. And they are able to sense the conditions within their colony and perform the behavior that's needed at that particular time. In other words, if they need to feed, if they need to go forage for food,

if they need to tend to the queen, et cetera. There's a lot of different behaviors. but the whole society is programmed so that these ants are performing the right behavior at the right time. Well, one of the craziest things, there's stuff in here that is so nuts. I can't even describe it. You really would need to see the videotape or read this. But you talk about the weaver ants that are cutting leaves and creating bridges. and it's just unlike anything that you could ever imagine.

I don't know if we have time to talk about the leaf cutter ants at work, what the leaf cutter ants do. Actually, we don't in this segment. We'll have to hang on in the next segment. But that's one of the most amazing things. Folks, the book is Animal Algorithms, Evolution, and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts by Eric Castle. Absolutely fascinating.

We'll be right back. Yeah, he's home, dynamite. He needs all the help he can hear. Well, he laid a strip for the Jersey Shore, preparing to cross the line. I can see the bridge was lined with bears, but it didn't have a doggone dime. I says, Pink Pen, this here's a rubber duck.

We just ain't it going to pay no... Books, we've got a mighty God more. Ain't you a beautiful sight. Books, I'm talking to the author of Animal Algorithms. Have you bought a copy yet? It's just amazing. There's so much in here, Eric Castle, the author. You talk about ants.

You say that ants recruit foragers, mark trails, signal for help in carrying large prey, orient toward home, mark a home range. They do things that are just mind-bending. You say, I'm reading here, that they secrete at least, carpenter ants secrete at least 41. compounds, and then the weaver ant that we'll talk about in a minute secrete's over 30. Again, the level of complexity is just, it's mind-boggling. There's no other way to describe it, really. I wanted to talk a little bit about the weaver ants. Can you describe that to my audience, because this is not so easy to describe?

Well, first of all, I would highly recommend, and there's a lot of good videos online, the YouTube and other places that are just fascinating that illustrate these behaviors. But the weaver ants are able to work in concert, you know, in a group to actually take a leaf and sew the edges of the leaf together to create a nest. So, but it's hard to actually describe verbally. You just, you actually have to watch the videos to just be a real. really appreciate how sophisticated this behavior is. And they exhibit every aspect of cooperative behavior that we think of as, you know, many,

certainly humans, but other mammals engage in. But in this case, it's ants. And you talk about the leaf cutter ants. I mean, you describe it pretty well in the book in case people can't get to the videos. But what you describe in here, I mean, I was so amazed. and I thought to myself, this is a whole field of study. I mean, when you talk about evidence for God or evidence against strict Darwinian evolution, this has to be front and center.

And as I've often said, the more we learn from science, the more obvious it is that there's more going on than Darwinian evolution can explain. You talked about there's so much that some of the, These ants do. They cut leaves to a size and weight optimal for what they're doing. I mean, again, this is the kind of thing. I just don't know how it's possible for these exceedingly tiny, tiny creatures to do what look like complex things. The sorts of things that we would do.

You know, we would say, okay, we're going to be carrying this wood there. So we want the size to be about this big because if it's bigger, then one person can't carry it. I mean, but they do this innately, evidently. Oh, exactly. It's all innate. It's all programmed. And I want to point on one other aspect of these, not just ants, but all of these social insects is that there is no, what we would think of as a master control. There's no hierarchy here where the queen ant, for example, or some other ant is actually,

directing the behavior of the other members of their colony. It's all self-organized. All of these animals, the ants, the termites, the bees, they're all working together in concert, but individually. So, again, but there's no master control. So each one is independently making a determination of what to do and when to do it. And that is really hard. There's a lot on that. You say that ants have been observed working in tandem to cut twigs,

much as two people collaborate using a cross-cut saw to fell a tree. The book is just loaded with this stuff. We're out of time. Eric Castle, congratulations on a magnificent achievement. The book is Animal Algorithms, Evolution, and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts. Eric Castle, thank you so much. Thank you, Eric. I really appreciate it. I enjoyed being with you.