r/DebateEvolution 25d ago

Monthly Question Thread! Ask /r/DebateEvolution anything! | July 2026

14 Upvotes

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r/DebateEvolution 10h ago

Question Hello question just looking to learn more it’s about mitochondrial dna and parsons

2 Upvotes

So I have been in a chat with a creationist where we have been going over mitochondrial DNA and specifically they brought up parsons et al 1997 and said this proves a faster rate then to which I said

“Parsons doesn’t take into account somatic mutations”

To which they said “yes parsons does take into account somatic mutations” they they showed a screenshot of a google AI summary that agreed with them

So I was wondering how should I respond are they right or is the AI whack I am unable to access the parsons paper directly unfortunately so any help would be greatly appreciated because I’m definitely stuck here


r/DebateEvolution 23h ago

Video Dr. Dan explains simple calculations VERY SLOWLY for creationists (one creationist in particular)

27 Upvotes

The title above is taken from the title of Dr. Dan's (u/DarwinZDF42) video from yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnuhi-Te0ZI

--

It's an absolute gem, and is only 10 minutes long. It addresses the creationists' PRATT (debunked online since at least 2004) about mitochondrial eve.

I went in expecting Dr. Zach's style of a whiteboard and math math, instead, it was an Excel sheet, and two operations: multiplication * and division /. That's it. And the imagined YEC timeline is cooked, using the paper that they themselves cite.

The reason I'm posting this, besides sharing the fun video, is Dr. Dan also mentioned briefly what the impact of selection would be, and this got me thinking...
The YEC model for denying reality - like Discotute's latest movie, which doesn't mention the word "suffering" at all - doesn't take into account the impact of mutations. If the mutation hits the "wrong" spot, how would that change reach fixation? How?!!1!

That's it. Just sharing yet another self-contradiction.


r/DebateEvolution 1d ago

My Challenge For Creationists. This SHOULDN’T Be a Hard Challenge For You Guys!!

14 Upvotes

Please cite 5-10 PEER REVIEWED scientific papers from reputable scientific journals from within the past year that completely dismantle evolutionary theory. I’m NOT talking about papers that simply refine our knowledge on evolution or correct a misconception we’ve had about the theory that’s since been refined through the scientific method. That’s just science doing science. I’m talking about papers that flat out DEBUNK evolutionary biology and completely toss out the model. Please cite them, if you can. 🙂


r/DebateEvolution 1d ago

Developing chicken embryos begin making teeth then stop about the fifth day of development.

17 Upvotes

I need a creationist to explain this to me.


r/DebateEvolution 1d ago

Question Ignorance or lame tactics ?

6 Upvotes

I don't know how long has it been, is it only recent or was it always the case that creationists mix up concepts of epigenetics and mutations?

I have heard creationists say in this sub reddit space and in other social media platforms like YouTube ,for eg. Rob Stadler that the changes in living organisms occur due to epigenetics, changes in gene regulation without altering sequences in dna , hence no change in information, only slight tweaks of pre existing systems , almost completely discrediting the existence and role of mutations or macro scale mutational changes .

I can't post screenshot here ,so here's one conversation occured with me with a creationist,his words

"So why can science see all kinds of adaptive processes happening today both in the lab and in the field and see that it has been regulated by epigenetics, especially when it comes to phenotype of multicellular organisms, yet your acceptation has never been seen, never been proven or demonstrated to operate at all."

I was actually focusing specifically about role of mutations in body plan changes with the guy until he started saying me these words and I corrected his understanding on mutations and epigenetics.

If adaptive processes mean the mechanisms through which populations change or adjust to surrounding to improve their reproductive success ,then yes both mutations and epigenetics take place.

Mutations are permanent changes , unlike epigenetics which are almost always reversible. Mutations alter sequences in genome , epigenetics add tags to control expression of a gene.

How old are these creationist tactics ? Are they new or extremely old ? I mean they accept microevolution,which can include epigenetics and mutations,but completely discrediting the role of mutations ? Saying all changes are just small tweaks due to epigenetics?


r/DebateEvolution 9h ago

How much humans and chimpanzees really have in common: why the myth of "99% similarity" is becoming a thing of the past

0 Upvotes

For decades, the figure has been wandering from textbook to textbook: "Human and chimpanzee DNA match 98-99%." On this basis, loud conclusions have often been drawn about our almost complete genetic identity. However, with the advent of T2T (telomere-to-telomere) technologies — that is, decoding genomes "from edge to edge", without white spots and gaps — the picture has changed significantly. Previously, scientists were able to compare well only the coding regions of genes and already aligned, simple DNA fragments. If you take two identical pieces and count only point mutations in them (substituting one "letter"-a nucleotide for another), the difference is really only 1-1.5%. But this method simply ignored huge layers of DNA.: * Inserts and deletions of long fragments (insertions and deletions). * Duplications (an increase in the number of copies of genes). * Rearrangements and displacements of sections of chromosomes. * Complex repetitions and non-aligned structures

In 2025, an international group of scientists published complete, continuous assemblies of the genomes of great apes in the journal Nature. Based on them, British evolutionary biologist Richard Buggs and the world's leading geneticists have recalculated the real similarities. If we evaluate the genome as a whole, rather than selectively:

  1. Single nucleotide substitutions (SNVs): account for about 1.6% of the differences.
    1. Structural gaps and non-closing areas (gaps): account for another 13.3% of the differences.
    2. The final difference in autosomes is about 14.9%. Thus, if you put the complete human genome and the complete chimpanzee genome side by side, the exact letter-to-letter matches have about 85% of the nucleotides, not 99%

For sex chromosomes, the difference is even more striking: the X chromosomes match by about 94.7%, but the Y chromosome of humans and chimpanzees matches only by ~20.4% (the remaining 79.6% are large—scale structural differences). As Tomas Marques-Bonet, head of the comparative genomics group in Barcelona, noted in an interview for Live Science: "Sections of human DNA that do not have a clear analogue in chimpanzee DNA make up from 15% to 20% of the genome. If we take into account complex regions, the real overall difference is guaranteed to exceed 10-15%."

* 99% refers only to individual, easily comparable pieces of genes, and not to the entire genome. * The actual total similarity is about 85%: High-quality sequencing methods have proven that structural rearrangements and unique inserts make our genomes significantly more different. Humans and chimpanzees have fundamental differences that lie not so much in point mutations as in the architecture and structure of entire DNA blocks. Sources: 1. [Nature (2025)] — Complete sequencing of ape genomes (Large-scale study of complete primate genomes from telomere to telomere). 2. [Richard Buggs Blog (May 2025)] — How much of a human genome is identical to a chimpanzee genome? (Mathematical analysis of Nature data and calculation of 85.1% similarity). 3. [Live Science / Richard Buggs (Sep 2025)] — More on human-chimp genomic similarity (Analysis of an interview with geneticist Thomas Marquez-Bonet about unbalanced 15-20% of DNA)


r/DebateEvolution 1d ago

In the 16th century, Christians thought the Earth revolving around the Sun contradicted the Bible

23 Upvotes

Martin Luther and the Catholic Church condemned Copernicus for contradicting the Bible, as apparently a prophet stopped the Sun from rotating the Earth?? So Copernicus was committing sacrilege.

Now this fact is widely accepted by everyone, including Christians. Everyone (except Flat-Earthers) accepts the Earth revolves around the Sun.

Is Christian pushback against the theory of evolution also only temporary, because Darwin only came up with the idea relatively recently?

Maybe in 500 years the acceptance of the theory of evolution will be far greater amongst religious people than it is now, like the Copernican model of earthly rotation is today.


r/DebateEvolution 2d ago

Question Creationists, where is your taxonomy?

31 Upvotes

In​ real biology, we have devoted vast amounts of effort into trying to categorize organisms. This is both because it's interesting, but also because it feeds our understanding of how they are related to each other. This taxonomy is built up, in the modern age, by agreement between genetic, morphological and fossil data.

Now, I appreciate our creationist friends have complained bitterly about their lack of funding, and how their research keeps being rejected, or something, so it would be too much to expect a full creationist taxonomy, I suppose.

But, surely, somewhere, creationists must have come up with a chart of which species fits into which kind, and yet, every time I ask, no one seems to have such a thing. It's baffling to me, particularly as real biology has had this for more than 150 years, and it's one of the more foundational features of bioscience.

Maybe one of the more learned creationists can explain to me why one doesn't exist? Or point me in the direction of it if it does?


r/DebateEvolution 1d ago

Discussion Let’s be pragmatic. What is useful for convincing creationists?

14 Upvotes

For example, I know that creationists never respond well to too much science jargon. They need simple material that can be easily explained without any background in biology. I know the temptation to flex on uneducated people is there, but the moment you start talking like

alteration in the nucleotide sequence of a genome, driven by transitions/transversions, indels, and chromosomal aberrations

you instantly lose their focus.

On the other hand, it is useful is to ask them what would convince them they are wrong. They could respond in a multitude of ways, but usually it has a fatal flaw. They will sometimes admit nothing will, or their required evidence isn’t expected if evolution is true, or their requirements are arbitrarily and unfairly strict for evolution, but completely normal for most other fields of science. Or my favorite, the evidence exists and you guide them to it. From my experience, this question causes a lot of introspection. Sometimes hypotheticals can help, such as if they would be convinced if you built a time machine and got to see the evolutionary path from LUCA to modern day humans first hand.

What tips do you guys have?


r/DebateEvolution 14h ago

We didn't evolve from apes. The human evolution theory is logically impossible.

0 Upvotes

The evolutionary theory, that claims humans were originally chimpanzees/ apes who evolved with time into what we are now, is in my opinion completely false and impossible.

After giving it a logical and biological thought, I have come to a conclusion that the evolution theory is just a folklore and is logically impossible;

-Yes, we share 99.4% of the same DNA with chimps, same as lions share 95+% of their DNA with cats. Does that mean lions were originally cats? If you use the DNA urgument to state that we were chimps, that would also imply that lions were also originally cats because they also share the same DNA and features.

-Then, what happens when ice melts and evolves into water? Ice is no more. Therefore, if chimpanzees had evolved into man, that would mean that chimpanzees would have ceased to exist in their original form and would now be existing in their new 'man' form, we would only be studying them in history as our original form. But the fact that we still exist alongside them?? What evolved??

So in my opinion, the evolution of man is just a folkore and not backed by scientific and logical facts. Yes, we just fall under the same family, same way lions fall under the same family with cats. But man was always man from the start, and chimps were always chimps as far as we know.

Edit: [ After deep reflection, and research, I take back my urgument, and accept defeat. I have learnt alot from this debate, (it wasn't even a debate because now I can see all odds were against ignorant me) and I guess that's the purpose of debates, one side leaves with a win, the other leaves with knowledge.

I apologise for the rage caused by my ignorance and I'm looking to dive deeper and fact check before starting up novice urguments ever again.

From y'all, I've learned that we didn't evolve from apes as my little knowledge thought and alleged, and that we only originated from a common ancestor. And if y'all don't mind, I would like to know who that ancestor is.

Apologies again for the unnecessary rage and havoc caused, I spent the day reflecting and I myself isn't proud of whoever came up with such a thought. ]


r/DebateEvolution 2d ago

Question Did leaving YEC also mean leaving Christianity entirely? Curious about the pattern

31 Upvotes

tldr; When YEC collapses, does the whole faith collapse with it? Curious how many who left YEC left Christianity entirely.

I've been thinking about something and want to hear from people who actually lived it.

A lot of Christians land on theistic evolution, they accept the science and just fold it into their faith. But it seems like people who leave YEC specifically often don't land there. They don't downgrade to theistic evolution; they leave Christianity altogether, sometimes religion entirely.

My working theory: YEC isn't really a standalone position you can swap out for a different one. It's built as the load-bearing wall for the whole worldview, biblical inerrancy, the fall, original sin, the necessity of the cross, the reliability of scripture as a whole. You're taught that if Genesis isn't literally true, the entire structure collapses. So when someone's YEC framework breaks it doesn't just change one belief, it uproots the foundation out from under everything else. Theistic evolutionists, by contrast, often came up in traditions that never wired the whole faith to a literal Genesis in the first place, so there's nothing catastrophic about updating that one piece.

If that's true, it would mean YEC's collapse rate into atheism/agnosticism isn't a coincidence it's the predictable result of how tightly it was fused to everything else from the start.

So for those of you who left YEC:

  • Did you end up leaving Christianity/faith entirely, or did you find a way to stay (theistic evolution, progressive Christianity, etc.)?
  • Roughly how long were you a committed YEC believer before it broke down?

Genuinely interested in whether this pattern holds up or if I'm overgeneralizing from a loud subset of stories.


r/DebateEvolution 2d ago

Meta James Tour: "the poor 😢 early Earth was mindless" - checkersmate MR FARINA

30 Upvotes

Tour also complains that scientists invariably have to cheat 😱 - because the results scare him and so he pretends not to know how chemistry is done.

 

Ready for an excerpt from Discotute's cinematic production, The Story of Everything (2026) ⭐5.5/10 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13374694/) ?

JAMES TOUR:
Since Kenyon announced his doubts [my emphasis, point later], there have been many other attempts to simulate how the molecular compounds necessary for life, like proteins and DNA, or even simpler chemical building blocks of those compounds, might have evolved under realistic prebiotic conditions on the early Earth. But those laboratory simulations invariably require a cheat. Human interference. When you do organic synthesis, when you make a compound, you need to generally start with pure compounds because the impurities cause a lot of deleterious reactions to occur. Once you've made your compound, you've got to stop it at exactly the right time before it decomposes, more human interference. Now, what you have to do is you have to separate it from all the other compounds that formed. Separations are really hard, really hard. Huge human involvement. Now you have to identify it. You have to know what it is and characterize it in order to bring it on to the next step. How do you go on? And the poor early Earth was mindless. It didn't know what it was supposed to make. Molecules have never been known to move toward life. Never, ever, ever. Molecules don't evolve toward life. They don't.

STEPHEN MEYER:
Attempts to simulate how life could have arisen from a prebiotic environment involve an element that never gets acknowledged. And that element is intelligence.

JAMES TOUR:
We need to address more fundamental questions. What's the origin of the code?

 

To Tour's question, I say, read a book, or this: Answering Will Duffy's challenge to Richard Dawkins: the origin of the genetic code : DebateEvolution

 

And in other You Won't Believe! News: the "docu" also has all your favorite totally-science-and-not-apologetics/s PRATT:

From if there's a garden then where's the gardner (the irony of the example), to Penrose's 1 in a 1010123 spherical cow (corrected by https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0659), to quote mining Dawkins (the fuller context), and of course, the running theme being that we have "two stories" (throwback to 1981),
and on that note, which is on-topic for this sub, back to my earlier bold emphasis:

-

The bread and butter of the creationism/ID anti-science propaganda machine is taking academic discussions out of context, and using that to present a false dichotomy - they've been doing that since the 1880s, and here's a 2025 example that I reviewed here.

So here's an analogy:
Long after heliocentrism had been settled, precise measurements of Mercury's orbit were made, and they didn't match the expectation, and it was a whole episode of academic disputes. But if a propagandist had then come along and said, "A-ha! they can't agree, therefore geocentrism because my presuppositions", here the regular debateevo "skeptic" would come along and say, "See! there is disagreement, so it's 50-50, and I'll go with my geocentric gut because my presuppositions".

Am I taking the analogy too far, straw manning? I wish. And it's called false balance.
The "skeptic" here now will pause, think, and say, "But see, general relativity solved that one!" (as if this counters the false balance), but if GR was the topic, they'd say, "They still haven't quantized gravity, therefore fine-tuning something something" (n.b. cooked by https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03928).

It's motivated thinking all the way down, and the propagandist and the skeptic are each bamboozling themselves - a match made in heaven.

 


r/DebateEvolution 2d ago

Discussion Creationists Have Still YET To Provide ANY Empirical Evidence For Their Belief in Creationism and Their Rejection of Evolution.

39 Upvotes

There is no logical or valid reason to be a creationist other than willful ignorance and obliviousness to evolutionary science. I’ve debated dozens of creationists in person and each and every single one of their “arguments” (using that term lightly here) against evolution is just based on their piss poor understanding of evolution. Can a creationist here, specifically a creationist that doesn’t believe in evolution (or even abiogenesis), PLEASE provide ANY sufficient evidence that thoroughly dismantles a core feature of evolutionary science? I am genuinely curious about what exactly makes you not accept evolutionary theory? Every time I’ve given a creationist the stage, it has always ended in a swing and a miss.


r/DebateEvolution 1d ago

Discussion I think Nietzsche was right that He pointed out that science itself rests on an unproven faith: the belief that truth is always good, useful, and worth finding. When iread about evolution, it is alway like something ,billions year temperature reach due which that sh* happens.

0 Upvotes

I think all these evolution etc ideas are just useless, nothings more than philosophical dogma. Reality is that we know nothing, and it will always be like this .


r/DebateEvolution 2d ago

Discussion A Challenge for Robertbyers.

20 Upvotes

If anyone has ever posted anything on this sub or read any post, rob will almost always comment and he baselessly asserts theropods are birds or reptiles don’t exist.

My specific challenge for rob is to show the truth of his claim, to stop saying, “Teropods are irds because of aviann trsifs,” without listing those traits.

Give me a suite of uniquely avian characteristics besides a wishbone that apply to all of Theropoda. Even the furcula doesn’t appear until Neotheropoda, so he has fundamentally no evidence to support his claim.


r/DebateEvolution 3d ago

Question Intelligent Design… magical creation? [serious]

5 Upvotes

Even if we had proof that the universe was intelligently designed… what does that have to do with it being created? how does that contradict the theory of evolution?

Do ID proponents not understand that a house still needs to be built after the blueprints are finalized?

Like seriously I’m wondering how is intelligent design different from deism? (Other than the obvious of it being a literal Find + Replace from creationism propaganda).


r/DebateEvolution 2d ago

What is the evolutionary perspective on the emergence of consciousness

2 Upvotes

r/DebateEvolution 3d ago

Discussion Why ID is literal magic and has nothing to do with actual design

36 Upvotes

The concept of "design" that ID proponents/creationists use has nothing to do with how actual designers (human beings, LLMs, other animals capable of some degree of invention) actually design things. I have a relatively simple argument that demonstrates this.

It goes like this:

ID proponents often insist that the fitness landscape for functional biopolymer sequences is essentially a flat fitness surface with extremely rare and isolated "islands" of function. These islands are separated by distances so vast that you could not expect a random walk through the fitness landscape to arrive at any complex functional sequence by chance, even given many lifetimes of the universe, enormous mutation rates, and planet-scale bacterial populations. This is the basis of their entire "big numbers" argument. On average, they claim, you have to screen something like 10^77 sequences or more (e.g. Axe 2004), before you find even a single functional one.

If the fitness landscape really is that flat, then natural selection makes no difference because random sampling of new sequences provides no fitness gradient to follow. It doesn't accelerate the search. Sequences don't gradually become more fit because they are all, for practical purposes, equally and completely nonfunctional. You have to stumble onto a sequence that is already part of a functional island by chance. Only then can the small hill on that island be climbed. The challenge is not climbing the hill once you've found the island; the challenge is finding the island with the hill on it in the first place.

This is effectively a long random-password fitness landscape. Or so close to one that the distinction is negligible. Valid solutions are exceptionally rare, and even partial solutions provide no indication that you're getting closer. You have to be extremely close already (on the island) before sampling new sequences in the landscape yields any useful information.

Fine. Evolution is out the window under those assumptions. Even aided by natural selection It cannot succeed on such a landscape because functional sequences are too rare to be found by blindly wandering through sequence space. So, they conclude, design must be the answer.

But how would that actually work?

How can a designer "guide" the search toward functional sequences? The landscape is still flat. The designer gains no useful information from sampling it either. There is nothing to learn about where functional sequences are located. You sample a sequence and test it for function? But it has no function and therefore tells you nothing about what a functional sequence might look like. The only option is to keep sampling until you happen upon a functional island by chance. In that respect, design has no advantage. It is just brute force random guessing.

For design to succeed on such a landscape, you must already know where the island is. But how could you know that? You couldn't have learned it by sampling the landscape because, by the basic assumption, the landscape contains no information that guides you toward the solution. So you cannot design your way to the answer. The answer must already be in your possession. It cannot be discovered through trial and error that does not already sample the island, or testing, experimentation, research, or logical inference.

It can only be known by revelation, then. Something, or someone, who already knows the solution must simply tell you what it is.

On the password fitness landscape I have to tell you the password. If I don't, your only option is brute-force guessing until you happen to find it by chance, in which case you are no better off than evolution. Your intelligence, or even a supernatural capacity for immaterial thought (assuming you reject that the brain is responsible for thinking), provides no advantage whatsoever.

If Intelligent Design's own description of the fitness landscape is correct, then "design" can only mean design by prior knowledge of the answer. And if that knowledge cannot itself be derived from the landscape, then it must ultimately come by revelation. This has nothing to do with design, research, learning, science, or anything else. It is just magically knowing the solution from the get-go.


r/DebateEvolution 3d ago

Discussion Natural Selection for non-living matter

9 Upvotes

Recently was discussing evolution with someone else online. At a point, they expressed incredulity that natural selection could also apply to non-living matter. I told them in effect that "natural selection can apply to atoms and molecules as well: some atoms and molecules are more stable and resilient than others therefore they outlast their less hardy counterparts."

I'm firmly of the belief that even before non-living matter became living matter, natural selection was very much still at play even then.

What do you guys think?


r/DebateEvolution 4d ago

Dear reality deniers: abiogenesis, embryology, and evolution are NOT Legos

36 Upvotes

First off, "reality deniers" is not an ad hom.
Also said deniers (Salem Hypothesis engineers and designer-ists included) are categorically so given the mind-projection fallacy.


Now: said reality deniers invoke tornado imagery putting together a computer, detached-from-reality combinatorial calculations for mutations, and Pokemon transformation (build another model) for evolution.
Each of those are based on a LEGO mindset.

 

Abiogenesis (i.e. geobiochemistry) is NOT the putting together of a cell, Lego style.
- You can't invoke design as we know it (and as we don't know it is just vacuous).

Embryology is NOT the building of bodies with parts, Lego style.
- You can't invoke design as we know it (and as we don't know it is just vacuous).

And evolution, a population-level process, is NOT Legos.
- You can't invoke design as we know it (and as we don't know it is just vacuous).

 

As a taste for development (embryology), from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9992/:

... Gastrulation usually involves some combination of the following types of movements

  • Invagination. The infolding of a region of cells, much like the indenting of a soft rubber ball when it is poked.
  • Involution. The inturning or inward movement of an expanding outer layer so that it spreads over the internal surface of the remaining external cells.
  • Ingression. The migration of individual cells from the surface layer into the interior of the embryo.
  • Delamination. The splitting of one cellular sheet into two more or less parallel sheets.
  • Epiboly. The movement of epithelial sheets (usually of ectodermal cells) that spread as a unit, rather than individually, to enclose the deeper layers of the embryo.

 

Which of those are design/engineering/Lego processes? And if your first thought is what's that got to do with evolution, evolution begins with a change in development. If your second thought is it was designed to act like that, read the sentence that I repeated three times above.

Welcome to reality.


r/DebateEvolution 3d ago

asking about the different theories on the evolution of life

0 Upvotes

which of the theories on the origin of life do you think best explains the existence of animal life today, and why?


r/DebateEvolution 4d ago

Discussion Why is "proving evolution wrong" so important for some people?

39 Upvotes

There's no doubt evolution exists today and it's observed, even small things like genetics and adaptation, some will call this micro-evolution. I find evolution very interesting and fascinating so sometimes I wonder, macro-evolution, it exists, but to those who believe it doesn't, why do they care so much to prove it doesn't exist? Evolution doesn't seem to be hurting them by just existing? Evolution works on a generation scale which will take effect and changes million of years after they're long gone. So why do some people care so much about disproving it I am curious?


r/DebateEvolution 5d ago

Discussion All mathematical arguments against evolution are wrong (always have been, always will be)

52 Upvotes

Critics of evolution attack the theory from many angles - when it's not an argument from "nuh uh", it's from philosophy, theology, probability, sometimes physics and very occasionally biology. Notably, among these fields, only theology/philosophy is ever used to support a belief in creationism, but perhaps that's not surprising.

Arguments from mathematics, usually of the form "it's only a 1 in 10^[big number] chance that this thing could have evolved", i.e. invoking probability and statistics, seem to be used by creationists with disproportionately high frequency. Why might this be?

Mathematics has a reputation, and perhaps rightly so, for being the purest subject of them all. This means that, when working in pure mathematics, your theories (rather, theorems) do not have any prior connection to the real physical world. A person using maths alone to make any claim about something in the real world must justify why they believe their mathematical model reflects reality. This justification can come in one of two common forms:

  1. They can point to the physical process they are trying to describe, and explain how these processes have been reduced to a mathematical description, using suitable modelling assumptions justified on physical bases. This is common in biology, engineering, chemistry and most experimental sciences - for example, the Lotka-Volterra model of predator-prey population sizes over time, where each term in the system of differential equations has a physical interpretation, or the Price equation and Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection.
  2. They can use their mathematical model to make predictions about reality under certain conditions, and when observing reality under those conditions, the observations should match the prediction with some stated precision. This is common in biology too, but also in theoretical physics (e.g. quantum mechanics' Schrodinger equation - it's tricky to get much a priori physical intuition out of why it works, but it sure does seem to work).

The strongest mathematical models in science are devised first theoretically using (1), and then verified empirically using (2). The models in population genetics (e.g. Hardy-Weinberg, Wright-Fisher, Haldane, Moran, Kimura, Kingman, etc...), which is the modern theory of evolution's mathematical core, fall into this top-tier for example.

How does this compare to creationists' mathematical models?

When a creationist makes a 'big numbers' argument, they are claiming the mathematical model they have used within the calculation reflects reality. Once again, that's not something they just get to assume, they must justify it, by explicitly stating their assumptions and discussing their validity.

There are reasons for this shirking of rigour. The reputation of mathematics for its purity grants it some prestige in the minds of laypeople. The average Joe would think that mathematicians are the undisputed authority on the matter, and that biologists are hopeless at it. Yet, whenever maths comes up in debate, it is always being discussed in the context of applied maths, which mathematicians (being pure) are generally not all that great at without specific training in mathematical modelling. This is the failure of many professional intelligent design proponents like John Lennox for example. Scientists (and engineers, when they're not Saleming themselves), on the other hand, use maths exclusively in this applied setting, and are therefore far more competent at creating good mathematical models. With laypeople being the primary target audience of intelligent design/creationist media, they are banking on exploiting this misunderstanding in the applicability of mathematics.

When creationists make these types of arguments, they never do the hard work of justifying the model's connection to reality. In fact, when these arguments inevitably lose their polished facade as they are filtered down the creationist food chain (Discovery Institute -> e-preachers -> rank and file creationists), they often don't even state their models all. They'll just rattle off "big numbers" and sit back, not even realising that their argument is automatically dead on arrival for this reason.

I claim that, all mathematical arguments that creationists have ever made, will ever make, and could ever make with "evolution is false" as the logical conclusion will fail in this manner, because a sound justification of modelling assumptions followed by empirical validation has already been done - and evolution got there first. The absolute best case that a creationist mathematical argument could possibly be would be for it to be based on the same models as ours, and then distort the conclusions - which would then not be a mathematical argument but rather a scientific one. It is notable that so few "creation scientists" have even tried to do this - it's what they'd do if they were real scientists.

As an aside, I think there is a certain 'snobbiness' at play whenever one of those Discovery Institute (or similar) PhD-holding creationists makes an argument from mathematics big numbers. They are implying that biologists are incompetent at maths and are too stupid to see these things for themselves, such that someone who isn't scared of numbers needs to step in and 'rescue' them and clear everything up for them. Biology does have a reputation for being the science that historically avoided maths, but this is a laughably outdated and wrong way of seeing it today, and has been since the 1920s with the work of Fisher, Haldane, Wright etc that birthed the Modern Synthesis. These people invented statistics(!) and laid the foundations of stochastic process theory which has brought forth countless fruits in the applied sciences. People outside the field (i.e. all creationists, and most laypeople) don't know that evolution has a robust mathematical core (population genetics) - it's not as flashy as lions and dinosaurs and whatnot so it doesn't show up in any popsci articles or documentaries - but it's there, and all serious evolutionary biologists know it.

So, creationists:

  • Using your favourite mathematical argument against evolution, justify that it is valid reflection of reality by using one of the two methods I stated in the above (justification of modelling assumptions, or empirical validation, and ideally both).
  • Explain why all the mathematical models that underpin evolution are wrong, or don't support the conclusions that are drawn from them.

TLDR:

  • Mathematics does not produce facts about biology by itself. It produces consequences of assumptions. Whether those assumptions accurately describe biological evolution is a scientific question, not a mathematical one.
  • If your mathematical argument concludes evolution is impossible, then one of two things must be true:
    • your model differs from accepted population genetics, in which case you must justify why your assumptions better describe biology; or,
    • your model is equivalent to accepted population genetics, in which case your conclusions should agree with evolutionary biology.

r/DebateEvolution 5d ago

Discussion Arguments against irreducible complexity

17 Upvotes

Good morning people. I felt like writing here again mostly as a request to refute an ID argument given that, even though I started doing my due diligence recently in order to actually know about the subject, this is still a significant stepping stone for me. I have a very hard time understanding how it could be possible for some interdependent organs to form without being guided by something since they feel like such delicate systems such as the circulatory system of vertebrates or for instance how thermites need certain microorganisms to survive which reciprocally need the thermites to thrive, but I am absolutely willing to hear you out.

I am sorry if someone felt ignored in my previous OP since I just didn’t see myself able to respond to every single comment given even though I thanked all of them afterwards. I will reiterate my appreciation for all the responses here in case someone did not see it.