Morgan Freeman narrates that the prevailing belief among biologists is that "life created itself about 4,000,000,000 (4 billion) years ago." Freeman's first two guests, Michael Behe and John Long, present opposing views about biological evolution.
Michael Behe champions intelligent design (ID). Behe doesn't believe that "random mutation" can explain biological evolution. For example, he believes that the bacterial flagellum (tail) can't be explained by evolution alone.
The ancestors of vertebrates had notochords. John Long discusses the missing links.
About 500,000,000 (500 million) years ago, plants and fungi colonized land. John Long asserts that selection pressure drove the evolution of vertebrae as opposed to one God (male deity) championed by self-professed Christian Michael Behe. DNA polymerase makes copies of DNA. RNA is made of a sugar called ribose (with 5 carbons). Threose nucleic acid (TNA) [with 4 carbons] is simpler than ribose.
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Michael Behe champions intelligent design (ID). Behe doesn't believe that "random mutation" can explain biological evolution. For example, he believes that the bacterial flagellum (tail) can't be explained by evolution alone.
The ancestors of vertebrates had notochords. John Long discusses the missing links.
About 500,000,000 (500 million) years ago, plants and fungi colonized land. John Long asserts that selection pressure drove the evolution of vertebrae as opposed to one God (male deity) championed by self-professed Christian Michael Behe. DNA polymerase makes copies of DNA. RNA is made of a sugar called ribose (with 5 carbons). Threose nucleic acid (TNA) [with 4 carbons] is simpler than ribose.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season4
#episode10
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#evolution
#spacedocumentary
#morganfreeman
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Were we put here on purpose by someone or something or did some random event create
00:16all the incredible complexity we see today? Scientists have been trying to understand
00:27how life was created. But there are still gaps in our understanding. Could our existence
00:36be the work of a higher power? Or was it the laws of nature? Did God create evolution?
00:55Space, time, life itself. The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
01:19Scientists estimate that billions of species have lived on Earth, from the tiniest microbes
01:25to a 50-ton dinosaur. The Bible says God made them all in six days. But there's another theory.
01:35Life created itself about four billion years ago. And the myriad species Earth has known
01:41have all been the product of evolution. Theology and science struggles to find a common ground.
01:50Did Charles Darwin get it right when he proposed that evolution created all life?
01:56Was it the guiding hand of some supreme being? Or could it have been both?
02:03I used to find caterpillars in the bushes near my house growing up. Fat, stubby worms. Before long,
02:19each one hid away inside a silky cocoon. I wondered what was going on inside that tiny shelter. How did something
02:30so ugly transform into a beautiful butterfly?
02:41Michael Behe is a biochemist from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. He's an advocate for an idea
02:48called intelligent design. That someone or something planted the seeds of life on Earth
02:55and has had a guiding hand in its evolution ever since.
02:59Intelligent design argues that random processes can't produce what we see in life today.
03:06But it has no quarrel with the idea of descent from ancient organisms to modern organisms.
03:13Michael's problem with Darwin's theory is that Darwin insists evolution stems from random mutations.
03:22When he looks around in nature, he sees plenty of things that look like they were randomly thrown together,
03:28like the debris in these woods.
03:31We had a storm pass through here recently. Nobody would think that any of this was particularly
03:38arranged on purpose. You know, it's just a jumble. Here's a stick here, there's a stick there, a stone there.
03:45But Michael believes other things in nature could not have arranged themselves randomly.
03:50They appear to be the work of a designer.
03:55Just as these sticks didn't randomly arrange themselves into the word life,
03:59Michael doesn't believe biological life came together randomly either.
04:04I'm a biochemist, and so I see evidence in nature in places where most people don't think about it,
04:12but it's in the cell. The cell is a fantastic nanoscale factory with machinery,
04:20literally machines made out of molecules.
04:23Michael studies the structure of bacteria.
04:27Some bacteria have tails called flagella that allow them to swim.
04:33It is quite literally an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim.
04:39And just like an outboard motor in our everyday life,
04:42it's got clamps to hold it on to the bacterial membrane.
04:46It's got a propeller that spins round and around.
04:49Turns out if you remove one or more of these pieces, the flagellum doesn't work at all.
04:56The complicated structure of bacterial tails led Michael to develop a theory he calls irreducible complexity.
05:04It claims that living systems need all of their parts in order to work.
05:09They can't evolve piece by piece.
05:12So Darwin's theory requires this gradualism wherein some feature of biology is built up slowly over time.
05:20But with an irreducibly complex system, that means a system that has a number of components,
05:26you can't build it up gradually over time and have it work.
05:31If the tail of the bacterium was missing just one part, the whole thing wouldn't function.
05:37Michael doesn't think organisms could have made such leaps of complexity through evolution alone.
05:44He thinks they must have had help from a creator.
05:50I'm a Christian, and so I certainly think God created the universe.
05:55But the nice thing about intelligent design is that you can realize something that was designed
06:01without knowing who the designer was.
06:04But you can be confident of the design.
06:07The complex design of bacteria tails isn't the most mysterious leap in biology.
06:13There are even more complex structures that are harder to explain, like the bony spines of vertebrates.
06:20Our earliest vertebrate ancestors had backbones called notochords,
06:26boneless flexible rods made of collagen.
06:29Some big freshwater fish that are alive today still have them.
06:34Other species, like us, have evolved bones in the back, vertebral columns.
06:42But how did long strips of collagen make the leap and become bony spines?
06:49Bioroboticist John Long at Vassar College is searching for these missing links.
06:55One of the great questions we're interested in is how did this group of animals that we belong to,
07:00called vertebrates, first evolve?
07:02Now, this happened 500 million years ago.
07:04So we don't have a time machine we can jump in, unfortunately, and go back and see what happened.
07:09John suspects the first versions of the vertebral column were small mistakes in our DNA
07:16that created little bony deposits on the notochord.
07:19They stuck around because they ended up making animals faster, stronger, and better at finding food.
07:26But fossils of ancient fish don't tell this evolutionary story step by step.
07:31There are huge gaps in the historical record.
07:34So John has decided to try and fill in these gaps by bringing extinct creatures back to life as robots.
07:46Welcome to the abyss.
07:49We create an artificial world here in this tank for our swimming bio-robots where we reanimate evolution that happened 500 million years ago.
07:58John's robots are called Evolvobots.
08:02They are about to play the game of life.
08:06This is a biomimetic vertebral column that's specially designed out of collagen,
08:11and we can vary the number of vertebrae, and this is the feature that we're allowing to evolve.
08:16John has given them notochords that can each be segmented with different numbers of vertebrae,
08:22from 0 to 5 to 10 to 15.
08:27He has created a world in which light means life or food.
08:33The Evolvobots task is to find their next dinner.
08:38So we go from 0 to 5 to 10 to 15.
08:44And what we're expecting to have happen, right, is that the robots with the most vertebrae over here
08:51will out-compete the robots with the fewest vertebrae.
08:54So this should be gold medal winner, silver medal winner, bronze medal winner, and thank you for trying.
09:00Now, dragging way behind now, looks like zero vertebrae.
09:10The Evolvobots with segmented backbones are performing better than the one without.
09:16Look at number 10, way out in front now.
09:19And then we have number 5 and 15 over on the side there is getting there, but slowly.
09:25To John's surprise, the Evolvobot with 10 bones won, beating the one with 15.
09:34So what do we have emerging here?
09:37It looks like intermediate number of vertebrae is doing a better job at getting food.
09:43So it's not just having a bunch of vertebrae, it's having the right number.
09:47John believes this shows that evolution is not the design process.
09:52Nature may have randomly tried different kinds of backbones and the best ones survived.
09:58We find that when there's selection pressure for enhanced feeding and fleeing, this is sufficient to drive the evolution of vertebrae.
10:07Using his research, John can trace the path of backbone evolution all the way up to us.
10:15So as humans, we get bothered by the idea that we could have evolved in all our wonderful brain-heavy glory by random processes.
10:24But one of the hard things to wrap your head around as a human being is that evolution works not by design, but by hands-off emergent principles.
10:34John's Evolvobots give us a window into how primitive organisms can evolve into upright, complex human beings.
10:49But has there been enough time in the history of Earth for this slow and unsteady process of evolution to happen?
10:56An MIT complexity theorist is doing the math to find out.
11:07Darwin's theory of evolution hinges on the idea that species gradually evolved through a process of genetic trial and error.
11:17In the four-billion-year history of life on Earth, evolutionists argue the first single-celled organisms evolved to become me.
11:30Those who believe in intelligent design argue that trial and error could never create something so complex in that amount of time.
11:39Does the theory of evolution add up?
11:42That's a question only a mathematician can answer.
11:47When MIT professor Scott Aronson was growing up, he had big dreams.
11:54When I was a kid, my dream in life was to create my own video games.
11:58You know, video games just amazed me.
12:00They were like these entire worlds in miniature.
12:03And yet, you know, unlike with the real world, someone must understand exactly how they work, right?
12:08Because someone made them.
12:09Scott used to imagine that the characters in his video games were built in a factory, like machines.
12:16But he eventually figured out that they were actually built from math.
12:22You could say, here is the game, and then here's the code of the game.
12:26And the code, you know, is not just some description of the game.
12:29It is the game, right?
12:31You change the code, and then you can watch the game do something different, which is really just a math problem.
12:36And, you know, for me, I think that was a revelation comparable to learning where babies come from.
12:43This realization inspires Scott to look for deep mathematical theories to solve the biggest mysteries in science,
12:51like how organisms evolved into complex beings.
12:55Believers in intelligent design like to say that for some random process like natural selection to produce the eye or the wing of a bird or the human brain is about as improbable as a tornado passing through a junkyard and somehow assembling a usable building.
13:15This is where I work. It's called the MIT Stata Center, and it does kind of look like a tornado passed through the place.
13:23This building, despite how it may look, was not designed by natural processes.
13:28It was designed by the architect Frank Gehry.
13:30But in math and computer science, we know that producing interesting structure doesn't always require a designer.
13:37Creationists often argue that evolution is a random, exhaustive search through all possible biological combinations.
13:46An impossible task that could never have gotten as far as it has in only four billion years.
13:55Scott believes complex traits like the human brain or a bacterium's tail can evolve in a reasonable amount of time because evolution is not a completely blind process.
14:12In fact, evolution has some clever shortcuts.
14:17Imagine this chessboard is blank.
14:21And Scott's goal is to properly color it so that no two neighboring squares are colored the same.
14:28So how could you do it?
14:30Well, there are three different approaches that may spring to mind.
14:33Let's see my avatar Super Scott here try to do it.
14:37If Super Scott had the magical powers of an intelligent designer,
14:42He could, I suppose, just see in his mind's eye all of the possible colorings and just instantly pick out the one that worked.
14:52If it takes just one step for the intelligent designer Super Scott to fill each square,
14:58it would only take him 64 steps.
15:01You could create humans in a matter of minutes if you had this kind of god-like vision.
15:07What else could we do?
15:10A brute force approach, just trying every possible coloring, every possible assignment of colors to all 64 of the squares.
15:19Well, there are two to the 64th power ways of coloring all the squares of a chessboard.
15:25That's about 18 quintillion.
15:27He's obviously going to be at this for quite a while.
15:30On this purely random mission, even if Super Scott gets all but one square correct, he has to start over again.
15:39If organisms evolved like this, it would take millions of times longer than the age of the universe for a single cell bacterium to evolve into the intelligent life we see today.
15:54But evolution works differently.
15:57It makes random guesses, but doesn't go back to square one whenever it makes a mistake.
16:03Here, Super Scott starts out with a completely random coloring.
16:08He can just look for any two squares that are colored the same, pick two of those at random, and then randomly change the color of one of them.
16:17In this evolutionary approach, Super Scott can make corrections along the way without having to start over every time.
16:25But you might wonder, how long will this take?
16:30Well, it turns out it will take longer than the intelligent designer, that's for sure.
16:35On the other hand, not nearly as long as the brute force approach.
16:40With an 8x8 chessboard, this random mutation approach will take about 5,000 steps.
16:465,000 steps is more than 64, but it's not anywhere near 18 quintillion.
16:54These emerging mathematics of evolution show that complex patterns can arise surprisingly quickly.
17:01We've seen that a mindless evolutionary process really can solve the problem, and it can solve it without an inordinate amount of time.
17:11Scott doesn't claim he's proven evolution happened, only that it is possible within Earth's timeframe.
17:18For me, the scientific attitude is not that there are no mysteries in the world.
17:22It's that you don't wallow in mystery.
17:25It's that you constantly look for explanations of things.
17:29And, you know, if you find a good explanation for something, you go with it, you know, at least until a better explanation comes along.
17:38But there is still one unknown variable in the equation of life.
17:43One chemist in Arizona is rolling back the clock to figure out where the first spark of life came from.
17:53All living things on this planet have one thing in common.
18:00From plants to bacteria to people, every life form uses the same genetic material built from DNA, or its close chemical relative, RNA.
18:13This makes perfect sense to evolutionists who believe all life evolved from a common ancestor.
18:20But there is a more profound question still to be answered.
18:27If DNA is the spark of life, what or who created DNA?
18:35John Chaput, chemist at Arizona State University, studies the roots of DNA, where it came from, and how it has survived long enough to produce complex life.
18:50For all cells to survive, they require DNA, which is the genetic information or the blueprint for that organism.
18:57And for cells to live, they have to grow and divide.
19:00And during that process, that DNA has to be copied identically so that you maintain that genetic information from one cell to the next.
19:07John is playing the role of an enzyme called DNA polymerase.
19:14His job is to copy the code of one DNA strand onto another.
19:20A always base pairs with T, and C always base pairs with G.
19:31But DNA can't replicate all by itself.
19:34It requires John, the polymerase, to do the copying.
19:38But at the first spark of life, there was no John.
19:43It's a big problem for the theory of evolution.
19:47DNA could not have been the first molecular basis for all of life because it can't copy itself.
19:53If not DNA, what was the first spark of life?
19:57It's quite possible that DNA may be the product of evolution and that other genetic materials preceded it in the history of life.
20:05DNA has a double helix structure like this rope.
20:10A genetic material that came before it would have to have been able to bind with its complex shape in order to pass on genetic information.
20:20One candidate is RNA, a simpler form of DNA that is found in our cells today.
20:27But yet, if we look at RNA, RNA is still very complicated and it may have been preceded by an even simpler genetic material.
20:36RNA is too complicated to be the very first genetic material because it's made of a complex sugar called ribose.
20:45Imagine you were a scientist 3.5 billion years ago, waiting for the first spark of life.
20:52In order for RNA to form, five specific sugar molecules would have to spontaneously come together one by one in a very particular order.
21:04Scientists think the odds of that happening in Earth's primordial swamp were highly improbable.
21:10You would be waiting for a very long time.
21:14But John thought there may be a genetic material made of a simpler sugar than ribose.
21:23Something more likely to form on its own.
21:26By recreating evolution in a test tube, he may have found the perfect fit.
21:33A sugar that forms TNA.
21:37No, not that.
21:41TNA, or 3-ose nucleic acid.
21:46And 3-ose is very exciting because it's chemically much simpler than ribose.
21:51John thinks TNA is a likely candidate for being the first spark of life because it is made of four identical sugar molecules that come together in just one easy step.
22:02And when you make a genetic polymer out of 3-ose nucleic acid, it turns out that it base pairs very well with RNA.
22:11So it has the ability to not only be chemically simpler than RNA, but it can also exchange genetic information with RNA.
22:17John may have found an ancestor of DNA, an ancient genetic blueprint that showed up long before the complex machinery that is in our cells today.
22:28He has not yet been able to show that TNA can copy itself.
22:32But he believes it is the best candidate so far to be the precursor to complex life.
22:39So life is so complex that many people feel that it must have had a higher power, a godlike power that helped create life as we know it.
22:49But the reality is, when you take a look at it from the perspective of, say, chemistry, it's really a question of what molecules might have been present and how are these molecules able to react with one another.
23:00Scientists are zeroing in on a molecule that may have been the first genetic material on Earth.
23:07So, would this be the spark of life?
23:11Perhaps the answer is deeper than chemistry.
23:14What if the origin of life can be traced back to one simple pattern?
23:19A pattern that governs the structure of the entire universe.
23:28Imagine if everywhere you looked, you saw the same pattern.
23:33In the sky, on the ground, in your body.
23:43You might wonder if it was the signature of a craftsman.
23:47In fact, our universe really is filled with such a pattern.
23:52Does this mean it must be the work of a grand designer?
23:56Before Adrian Bejan became a professor of engineering at Duke University, he had a very different career.
24:09Adrian was a basketball star in Romania.
24:13I was a player under the communist system.
24:17Basketball is not communism.
24:20Even under communism, basketball was played correctly.
24:24The greatest single lesson from growing up in basketball was the idea that the ball flows through channels.
24:33The channels are not rigid.
24:35They are constantly morphing.
24:38Just as Adrian the athlete saw basketball as the flow of a ball across the court,
24:43Adrian the engineer now studies that flow.
24:46He thinks it may be the key to understanding the design of the universe.
24:55Basketball is a live flow system.
24:59The ball flows from any point of the area to the basket.
25:03The players on offense are trying to open up the channels to facilitate the flow.
25:12The players on defense at the same time are closing down the channels.
25:17Over time, the better players get the ball more often, making certain channels bigger and busier, while the less active channels stay smaller.
25:31Eventually, a pattern emerges that resembles the shape of a branching tree.
25:36This tree shape is everywhere.
25:39They occur in the billions and billions.
25:41They constitute a phenomenon of all nature.
25:45Adrian sees the same pattern everywhere in nature, from a tree to a lightning bolt to the veins of a leaf.
25:54He's trying to figure out where this pattern comes from.
25:57He thinks it has to do with the way things flow from one point to another.
26:05What flows through the tree?
26:08Water is flowing from the ground back into the dry wind.
26:12The other thing that flows through the tree structure is a mechanical force or mechanical stresses.
26:19The force of the wind is transmitted to the ground through the tree.
26:24Adrian believes this design is an expression of a universal law of nature.
26:31He calls it the constructal law.
26:35It states, most generally, that anything that is finite size and moves, in order to persist in time, which means to live,
26:45it must evolve such that it flows more and more easily for greater and greater access over time.
26:55Adrian sees evidence of the constructal law inside of all of us.
26:59Oxygen flows through our lungs.
27:02Blood flows through our veins.
27:04Electricity flows through our neurons, all in the same tree-like design.
27:09The universe seems to be hardwired to create complexity, almost as though it was designed that way.
27:18To a believer in creationism, it would seem like the mark of a creator.
27:25Adrian says no.
27:26The design is the phenomenon, just like the gravitational fault.
27:31We do not know why these things happen.
27:34All we can do is to summarize these phenomena, and those are the laws.
27:41Adrian thinks this tree-shaped pattern naturally creates stronger, fitter organisms because it helps improve flow.
27:48Whether it be water flowing through the trunk of a tree, or the ball flowing through the court to the hoop.
27:58Basketball is actually a metaphor for the movement of the individual in society.
28:04It is the same kind of movement through channels that the individual tries to open up,
28:09and at the same time, channels that others are, in fact, unwittingly trying to close down.
28:15Let's go!
28:18Perhaps the design of the universe is like a giant tree,
28:22constantly growing and evolving through improved flow.
28:28But across the world and South Africa,
28:31a cosmologist is looking at the design of the universe through a different lens.
28:38He's turning the laws of nature upside down.
28:41How do large and complex things come to be?
28:48They're collections of many little things.
28:52Bodies are made from cells, and cells are built from atoms.
28:57But the atoms in my body don't know they're part of me.
29:01How do they know what to do?
29:02Why don't I just fall apart into a trillion tiny pieces?
29:08Are they being guided by a higher power?
29:12George Ellis, from the University of Cape Town in South Africa,
29:18is one of the world's leading theorists in physics and cosmology.
29:21Recently, he has shifted his attention from trying to understand the cosmos,
29:25to trying to understand how complex systems on Earth come to be,
29:29like the sounds of the Cape Town Youth Choir.
29:30To George, a beautiful song can be scientifically understood in different ways.
29:31His name is George.
29:32George Ellis, from the University of Cape Town in South Africa,
29:34is one of the world's leading theorists in physics and cosmology.
29:37Recently, he has shifted his attention from trying to understand the cosmos,
29:42to trying to understand how complex systems on Earth come to be,
29:46like the sounds of the Cape Town Youth Choir.
29:48To George, a beautiful song can be scientifically understood in different ways.
30:00His old physicist self would have seen the singing of the choruses
30:04as emerging out of activity at the subatomic level.
30:08I think the physicists would see what is happening here
30:11as the effect of fundamental particles interacting with each other,
30:15it's electrons and protons that these youth can sing this way.
30:18It's because in their nerve cells, electrons are flowing
30:22and they're sending signals down from the brain to the nerves,
30:25and so it's physics at the bottom all the way,
30:27and the physics is actually what's causing it to happen.
30:29Brother, let me be your servant, let me be your servant.
30:37But George now wonders if there's another way to understand the choir's music.
30:41Perhaps these singers aren't just an aggregation of subatomic physical processes.
30:45The flow of causation is from the conductor to all the members of the choir,
30:51so he's coordinating the choristers' action,
30:55and so the flow of the electrons in the people's brain,
30:57that is responding and being controlled by what the conductor wanted to happen.
31:01So it's top down from the conductor's mind into those electrons that are flowing in people's brains.
31:06George calls this idea top-to-bottom causation.
31:15The fundamental particles that comprise each chorister are the bottom level
31:20and are being controlled by a higher level, the conductor.
31:23If there were no conductor, George would need some earplugs.
31:28The amount of beauty coordination you can get purely bottom-up is strictly limited.
31:46You have to have the central coordination,
31:49and it's the thought that is controlling the physics and making the physics happen.
32:03Perhaps the universe needs a conductor to create the beauty of nature all around us.
32:07And George thinks there is evidence that this is true in the form of geometry.
32:13This is Pythagoras' theorem. If you take that length, square it, add it to that one squared,
32:18you get the square on the hypotenuse.
32:20So that's an eternal principle which is true everywhere in the universe.
32:25George believes the universe has an underlying geometry that governs what is possible in the physical world.
32:32He thinks geometric laws existed before our universe existed.
32:39Humans are only discovering them.
32:42It's an idea that stems from the Greek philosopher Plato,
32:46who believed mathematical patterns existed in some abstract space before the birth of our universe.
32:52I think when the universe was set up, the mathematical patterns pre-existed the universe.
32:57But it isn't only physical things that exist. There are also meanings that exist.
33:03Just as Plato believed the universe was born with mathematical truths,
33:08he said the same could be true for human ethics.
33:12To George, it is a philosophy that suggests our rules of right and wrong may stem from some eternal truth
33:19that dictates how humans should treat each other.
33:22These ethical patterns were set out there, in my opinion, before any human beings ever existed.
33:25I've arrived at this position through a long process of trying to understand complexity,
33:31because it's quite clear that there is meaning, there is more going on in this purely mechanical kind of stuff.
33:38Did someone or something create the laws that govern nature and society?
33:44Are human ethics a sign that life was designed by a moral being?
33:49Or is morality a product of evolution?
33:54One man in California is taking a giant leap of faith to find out.
33:59Evolutionary theory seeks to explain life in all its forms.
34:07But in theology, there is more to creation than our physical bodies.
34:13God is master of our moral universe.
34:16Can morality arise in the human brain by the haphazard process of biological evolution?
34:24Or was it designed?
34:27Professor Paul Zak from Claremont Graduate University is a scientist on the frontier.
34:41He's a pioneer of a field called neuroeconomics, which is the study of how brain chemistry affects people's decisions in life.
34:52His latest quest is for the origin of human morality.
34:56My mother, before she was my mother, was a nun, Catholic nun.
35:01And so mom was the ruler of the morality world.
35:04But I really had this underlying kind of worry that,
35:07gee, aren't there many different forms of morality?
35:09Where do good and evil come from?
35:11And that's the question I really spent my time running experiments to identify.
35:15Paul thinks there might be a single molecule responsible for morality.
35:20His research has led him to one possible candidate, a brain chemical called oxytocin.
35:29Oxytocin is a chemical the brain makes that until about 10 years ago was only known in humans to facilitate birth and breastfeeding.
35:36So when I first started doing this work, one of my colleagues said,
35:39it can't be that important if it's only for women.
35:41But in fact, men's brains make it too.
35:43And the question was, why?
35:45Is it actually doing something?
35:46Paul wondered if oxytocin had a larger role than aiding in reproduction.
35:52That perhaps it helps all humanity feel compassion, love, and trust.
35:58In order to find out, he began a long-term study of how this brain chemical fluctuates
36:05when a person is forced to trust a stranger.
36:08Today, his test subject is himself.
36:11We're going to go skydiving today to find out what happens to the human brain when you're under high stress in the presence of another person.
36:19So we're showing the laboratory that oxytocin facilitates trust in strangers.
36:23So how about trusting your life to a stranger? That's what we want to test today.
36:27Paul first takes a sample of his own blood on the ground.
36:31This will be used as the baseline level of oxytocin so he can compare it to his blood levels when he lands.
36:38Tandem skydiving is the ultimate test of trust.
36:43Two people, one parachute.
36:46Paul's life is in the hands of his instructor, Andy.
36:51So this is Andy, so I've just met him for the first time, and I'm going to start my step to him, and Jeff, I'd have an airplane at 12,500 feet.
36:57So, I don't know how you're trained, I don't know the pilot, I don't know who packed your chute.
37:00I don't even know that either.
37:01Yeah, okay, so.
37:03After a brief coaching session on the ground, there's nowhere left to go but up.
37:14Most skydive accidents happen from human error. Improper packing of the parachute, inadequate inspection, poor jumping technique.
37:23Paul is putting his trust into a crew of strangers.
37:32I don't think I have a choice, I'm really going to trust Andy now, so something all works out.
37:37Do you have to do this?
37:38Let's go!
37:39All right!
37:40Let's do it, baby.
37:41Oh, look at that tube!
37:43That's the hardest.
37:44That's the hardest.
37:45That's a nice speed, Brett.
37:46Yeah.
37:47That's funny.
37:48Oh, man.
37:50And, head to the right.
37:53Woo!
37:58Woo!
37:59Woo!
38:19Woo!
38:20Woo!
38:22Woo!
38:23Woo!
38:24Woo!
38:25Woo!
38:26Woo!
38:27Woo!
38:28Woo!
38:29Woo!
38:30Woo!
38:31Woo!
38:32Woo!
38:33Woo!
38:34Woo!
38:35Woo!
38:36Woo!
38:37Well done!
38:38You're unhooked!
38:39All right.
38:40Welcome to the rest of your life!
38:41Thank you!
38:42Okay!
38:44After the jump, Paul immediately draws his blood again.
38:47again. I was trapped to the sky 12,000 feet, you know, we dropped like a rock
38:53out of this airplane, very unusual kind of event, where I'm watching the plane
38:57move away from me, kind of panic, kind of fear. Paul brings his blood samples back
39:03to his lab to find out if the intense feeling of trust was reflected in the
39:09chemistry of his brain. As one might expect after jumping out of an airplane,
39:14Paul had almost a 500% increase in cortisol, a stress hormone, and a 40%
39:21increase in testosterone, which is associated with the feeling of courage.
39:26But did the skydive cause a moral molecule to jump into action? I had about a 17%
39:35increase in oxytocin. 17% is actually a fairly large increase for an interaction
39:40with a stranger. So for example, at a bride at her wedding that I went to, I took
39:45blood before and after, and found that she had a 28% increase. So I'm half as
39:49connected to my skydive instructor as the bride was to her groom at a wedding. So
39:54that ain't bad.
39:54Paul's studies have shown that oxytocin levels are strongly linked to other social
40:01behaviors besides trust, like empathy and generosity. If oxytocin is the molecule that controls our
40:09moral behavior, where did this molecule come from? Was it designed by a creator who yearned
40:18for a moral society? I want to be humble and say, look, I don't know what happened before
40:22evolution started happening. And if there's a God, how wonderful is that? But it's not my place
40:27as a scientist to say whether God exists or not. I think that's a question of faith.
40:32Is a moral molecule in our brains the sign that we are designed by a holy God? Or did
40:41our brains evolve that way, allowing us to survive together as a species? If it is oxytocin that
40:52makes us trust and tolerate one another, maybe this single molecule is the answer to bringing
40:59creationists and evolutionists together. Creationists argue that only the guiding hand of God could
41:08arrange the countless atoms of the cosmos into the remarkable pattern that exists today. That
41:16moral molecules would only form in a moral universe. Theory of evolution argues that one simple rule,
41:25survival of the fittest, can explain everything that lives today, from the most rapacious predators
41:32to beings like us who are guided by a deep sense of what is right and what is wrong. The debate isn't
41:41likely to end any time soon. But there is one thing both sides do agree on. The sheer wonder of creation. No matter how it got here.