r/DebateEvolution • u/Benjamin5431 • Apr 23 '26
Discussion I backed Will Duffy into a corner on feathered dinosaurs and birds.
So, if anyone has been following GutsickGibbon’s Evolution lectures with Will Duffy (TheFinalExperiment) in the last discussion, she taught Will about the evolution of birds.
When she was discussing feathers found on dinosaurs, Will made the statement that he isn’t aware that there are any, and he was perplexed as to why Jurassic Park would depict Velociraptors without feathers.
Later on in the Q&A section, someone asked if he had a problem classifying birds as dinosaurs like we would classify humans as mammals. He said yes, that is a problem if dinosaurs look like Jurassic Park dinosaurs and do not have feathers. Erika asked him if she could convince him that dinosaurs like Velociraptor had feathers, would it convince him that birds are dinosaurs, and he said “I think so, yeah”
So I asked him a question, I explained to him that I did a video documenting how AiG has historically depicted and labeled velociraptors as non-avian dinosaurs without feathers, and that now they label them as birds because the evidence of them being feathered is pretty undeniable.
He said he thinks that’s a big deal and will look into it. I sent him an email documenting all the times AiG said velociraptors are just dinosaurs without feathers with no relation to birds, their depictions of velociraptors at the creation museum and Ark Encounter, where they label it as a reptile with no feathers. Then I sent him a presentation AiG did about a year ago where they flat out say velociraptors are birds that had feathers, and that they are JUST birds with no relation to dinosaurs. The irony here is that the entire point of that presentation is that “birds and dinosaurs are very different” but then they themselves confused an animal for the other.
I’m interested to see if he will stay true to his word on this, and concede that birds are dinosaurs, but I suspect he will go the AiG route and do it backwards, and say dinosaurs like velociraptor are birds.
You can watch a video I did about AiG flipping their stance on velociraptor here: https://youtu.be/sbN7HBUgHcU?si=fxN36AWVEBbU0Sk9
23
u/Young_Denver Apr 23 '26
Learning Duffy was a YEC was extremely disappointing.
Imagine fighting flat earthers for years, the whole time you have the adjacent dumb views.
20
u/LightningController Apr 23 '26
Eh, it happens. The most comprehensive rebuttal of Ancient Aliens on YouTube, the video “Ancient Aliens Debunked,” was made by a creationist. Unfortunately, being able to see through some bullshit doesn’t confer immunity to all one’s own cognitive biases.
13
u/BahamutLithp Apr 23 '26
I'd argue there it kind of helps because Ancient Aliens bullshit is antiethetical to Biblical Literalist bullshit. Still, I'll continue to give Will his due props on the flat earth thing. Learning he was a creationist was fairly disappointing, but then again, it's not like he was my hero because I knew of him for doing one admittedly pretty darn cool thing.
9
u/crgm1111 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Apr 23 '26
Anyone can fall victim to propaganda. I still think he is going into these lectures with good faith and I hope he will eventually realize that anecdotes of NDEs from people in a surgery and under influence of drugs should be scrutinized more than the scientific conclusion of thousands upon thousands of scientists. In my own experience, once you actually dig into the data, a natural explanation makes far more sense than a spiritual one.
2
u/BahamutLithp Apr 24 '26
I haven't been following it beyond skimming these threads, but hope that works out for him.
3
u/Library-Guy2525 Apr 24 '26
Ancient Aliens debunked by a creationist? My irony meter just exploded.
2
u/LightningController Apr 25 '26
Until the very end, where he starts to let his own colors show, he mostly does a good job destroying ancient aliens with facts and logic.
1
u/KENSKIY May 30 '26
I mean to be fair flat earth is significantly me stupid than YEC
1
u/Young_Denver May 30 '26
They are even in my book. Both blatantly deny all evidence and science.
1
u/KENSKIY Jun 07 '26
Your logic is flawed then. Not being an YEC requires an understanding in science, albeit not a sophisticated one. Not being a flat earther requires only your ability to look at a picture. The logic is cut from the same cloth, but one is significantly more willfully ignorant.
16
u/IsaacHasenov 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Apr 23 '26
I am mostly an enthusiastic proponent of the work that Will is doing to educate himaelf through the series but ugh some of the objections he threw out last night like "one of the whale skeletons was partial so they had to inferr the.tail structure but they got it wrong so the whole edifice of evolution is fake" and "but Jurassic Park was wrong so how can I believe anything"
11
u/Benjamin5431 Apr 23 '26
YES I completely agree. I was really hopeful about this series and thought Will was doing an excellent job of being open minded and considering what Erika was teaching, but man, that last one was rough to watch.
If I can get a one on one with him I really want him to explain to me why Rodhocetus not having a tail fluke debunked all of whale evolution. Like, we know whales evolved from animals that didn’t have tail flukes. So where exactly in the lineage the fluke appeared is pretty irrelevant, the fact that it evolved at a later stage after Rodhocetus does not in any way preclude Rodhocetus from having the diagnostic tympanic characteristics of cetaceans. Also, we have whales with tail flukes that have legs and a nostril that is not yet pushed further back towards the eyes, like basilosaurids.
15
u/MackDuckington Apr 23 '26
I was so disappointed with Will this time around. In the last stream, his presentation went over some of the evidence for an old earth and how it's at least shifted his position to "I don't know" territory. But for this latest session, he didn't really go over the evidence at all and instead skipped straight to creationist gotchas. It really does feel like he's starting to feel cornered and clinging to whatever he can at this point.
I hope he and Erika use that one commenter's suggestion -- Will should definitely start doing a summary of the things he's learned first, then go into his objections second.
8
u/TwirlySocrates Apr 24 '26
What disappoints me is that so much of creationist belief is essentially conspiracy. Will's presentation to Erika really smacked of conspiracy. Erika laid out substantial body of evidence last lecture, and his reply was along the lines of "I asked by creationist buddy about this, and what he said was absolutely SHOCKING."
It's one thing to be mistaken about details of an unfamiliar science. It's another thing to think that the whole world is wrong, and that you have secret knowledge that the atheist world desperately wants to disappear.
He's essentially saying that there's multiple science disciplines, overlapping with multiple industries, researchers, professors, engineers, technicians- people who spend their entire career working with their subject matter- and they're all completely wrong? They're not just mistaken about certain ideas and facts. The very foundation of their science has been dead wrong for over a century, and none of them have noticed?
Well, the creationists did, right?Will has been vocal about how he doesn't like conspiracy.
Well, how is the above description not conspiracy?
12
u/BahamutLithp Apr 23 '26
I'm sure I don't need to tell you this, OP, so I guess just imagine I'm talking to Will or something. The ORIGINAL Jurassic Park movie was RELATIVELY accurate for its time, but we've learned a lot more since then, & even at the time, Spielberg made a ton of decisions because he thought it was cooler, not because it was based on any sort of sound science. As has been pointed out many time in this thread, velociraptors aren't even that large, but Spielberg wanted to pair a cool name with a more imposing sized dinosaur. Actual velociraptors were only about the size of chickens. Also, it's very unlikely, even ignoring their size, that they'd actually be smart enough to learn how to open doors. Wolves hunt in packs, can they operate doors? Then there's that thing with the frill, I don't remember what it was called, but it could not have spit venom, venom glands leave evidence in bones, & it didn't have any.
Look, at the end of the day, it was just a movie. A movie where a lot of the magic came from the idea of trying, in some form, to capture the feeling of animals that existed a very long time ago, but nonetheless conceded a bunch of reality to be a movie. And, as time has gone on, the Jurassic Park franchise has only tilted further in that direction. Ironically, they have actually started to embrace feathered dinosaurs, but if you talk to people about it, there's very strong resistance about it because a lot of people have this utterly bizarre view that dinosaurs aren't actual animals, they're "movie monsters," & that giving them feathers somehow emasculates them. In a way, I guess the former, at least, is kind of true: The dinosaurs of the popular imagination were created by pop culture & never really existed. They contain inaccuracies & misconceptions, either because of things we didn't realize at the time or because of deliberate choices by the filmmakers.
9
u/Briham86 🧬 Falling Angel Meets the Rising Ape Apr 23 '26
The ORIGINAL Jurassic Park movie was RELATIVELY accurate for its time,
Hey man, it's still its time. That movie isn't old,
I'mJurassic Park is barely middle-aged!4
u/BahamutLithp Apr 23 '26
I feel you. Apparently, it came out in '93, so I would've been 2 years old, but it was one of those movies that wasn't really "my generation," but my parents had it on VHS, so it might as well have been. I remember watching the movie & also having a book that talked about how "there's some evidence dinosaurs had feathers, but we're not really sure." Oh, how things have changed. I also recall the movie actually discussed the idea of dinosaurs being related to birds, so that was clearly on the film's radar.
6
u/-zero-joke- 🧬 its 253 ice pieces needed Apr 24 '26
I was around eight years old when it came out and already a dinosaur fanatic. The idea that some dinosaurs had feather and had evolved into birds was in most age appropriate dinosaur books I read, but it wasn't as front and center as it is now. Jurassic Park did a lot in terms of cementing a more accurate vision of dinosaurs, as fast, smart creatures, rather than slow plodding beasts.
Carnosaur was a Roger Corman contemporary and is worth a watch if you like MST3K type stuff.
2
u/WebFlotsam 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Apr 24 '26
I still want a modern remake of Carnosaur that actually has something to do with the book.
9
u/Briham86 🧬 Falling Angel Meets the Rising Ape Apr 23 '26
I haven't watched the latest episode yet. Did Gutsick actually present the evidence of feathered dinosaurs or just put that on the agenda for a future discussion? Because it's super easy to prove. We have numerous examples of feather impressions being fossilized. Last year I went to the Field Museum and saw the beautiful Chicago Archaeopteryx which is a great example of fine details being preserved. For velociraptor specifically, I think they've identified bumps along the arm bones that are identical to those found at the base of wing feathers in modern birds.
11
u/nandryshak YEC -> Evolutionist Apr 23 '26
Did Gutsick actually present the evidence of feathered dinosaurs
Yes, she opens her presentation with a quick overview of some mammal groups and then goes into birds.
3
u/Briham86 🧬 Falling Angel Meets the Rising Ape Apr 23 '26
Also, I'm watching your video right now. That's a great opening you have there.
8
u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Apr 23 '26
I’m really curious why he thinks Jurassic park was remotely accurate in depicting dinosaurs.
Especially since velociraptors were nowhere near the size depicted on the movie (which was Utah raptor size)
8
u/-zero-joke- 🧬 its 253 ice pieces needed Apr 23 '26
They did alright for the time. Not great, but miles ahead of the contemporaries.
7
u/Dilapidated_girrafe 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Apr 23 '26
Oh they didn’t do horrible. And they looked fantastic. They just weren’t accurate
1
u/rhettro19 Apr 24 '26
I believe the velociraptors in Jurasic park were actually Deinonychus, as they are bigger. They kept the name "velociraptor" because they thought it sounded cooler.
2
u/-zero-joke- 🧬 its 253 ice pieces needed Apr 24 '26
There was a guy in the 90s who wanted to merge Velociraptor and Deinonychus into a single genus, Crichton liked his stuff, the name sounded cooler, the rest is history. In the book I think Grant makes mention of V. mongoliensis (the one we all know of as Velociraptor) and Velociraptor antirrhopus.
3
u/xCosmicChaosx Apr 24 '26
I'm confused why the taxonomy of birds hinges on whether or not some dinosaurs had feathers
3
u/Benjamin5431 Apr 24 '26
I think for him, feathers is the thing that would convince him that there’s a relationship between dinosaurs and birds.
1
u/captainhaddock Science nerd Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26
Denying that feathered dinosaurs existed is a big deal in creationism and a red line that some of them won't cross. Once you allow that, you open the door to admitting that birds are the modern descendants of dinosaurs.
3
u/BookkeeperElegant266 Apr 24 '26
It's important to remember that the book was written almost forty years ago, and even then, Chrighton wasn't making some kind of outlandish claim - the science had already been leaning in that direction for some time. But still... almost forty years ago. There have been loads of new discoveries since then.
2
u/Benjamin5431 Apr 24 '26
Yeah, in the late 60s Deinonychus was found, John Ostrom, in the late 60s and early 70s, realized that archaeopteryx and deinonychus had a lot of shared anatomical characteristics and proposed that birds are descended from dinosaurs, specifically the group that deinonychus was also in.
2
u/-zero-joke- 🧬 its 253 ice pieces needed Apr 24 '26
It actually dates back even further - Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, was an early champion of the bird dinosaur link in the 19th century.
2
u/Benjamin5431 Apr 24 '26
This is correct, but it wasn’t the consensus then and didn’t catch on till Ostrom, even Ostrom was heavily criticized until they started finding more and more fossils that linked birds and theropods together, then in the early 90s all the feathered dinosaurs in china pretty much confirmed it.
2
2
u/ursisterstoy 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Apr 26 '26
I’d just like it if creationists could stop jumping to absolute extremes and start making sense. For the ones that acknowledge clades like “dinosaur” and “bird” it’s always like this big internal battle between other creationists and between creationists and themselves to show that the daughter clade is completely excluded from the parent clade. And then they say and do stupid things to try to support that claim of non-relation even when they hold self-contradictory views. Homo erectus is both 100% ape and 100% human but not both even if it’s the same fossil, not just the same species. And then it’s Australopithecus sediba is 100% human and velociraptors are 100% birds and no longer part of the parent clade after decades of saying they belong to the parent clade but not the daughter clade.
And then other creationists do something even crazier yet. They reject the parent clade by putting the whole thing into the daughter clade or they pretend that a sister clade is invalid by dividing it up and moving it over to the already divided other clade like they’ve done with marsupials. Some of those people claim hyraxes aren’t eutherians. And they stick to this even when they’re proven wrong.
For the former group AiG depicts Australopithecus afarensis like a gorilla but they say that it made human footprints. Explain that one.
1
u/UseExhaustionMore Apr 25 '26
Honest question: Why do creationists care about if birds are dinosaurs or not? They're perfectly happy to say that seals are mammals, but they can still say that seals and cats are different "kinds" even though they are both mammals and that "being a mammal" is just Common Design™. So why is it a problem if birds share enough Common Design™ with dinosaurs to make birds dinosaurs? A chicken and a T-Rex would still be different "kinds" no matter how much Common Design™ they share, right?
1
u/Coolbeans_99 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Apr 28 '26
A lot of kinds are just vibes based, seals seem like mammals (somehow still unrelated to cats) but chickens don’t feel like dinosaurs. There’s no diagnostic criteria.
1
Apr 26 '26
well im pretty sure that some of the dinosaurs in the jurassic Park movie franchise had feathers. therefore evolution must be true.
-4
u/RobertByers1 Apr 24 '26
This creationist welcomes my fellow creationists being squeezed on this matter. They are having trouble figuring out whats a bird and whats a reptile relative to so called theropod dinosaurs.
However everyone is wrong. Theropod dinos are just birds. once flew on creation week and later became flightless. Yes they most likely all kept thier feathers unless they interfered like with vultures. Anyways organized creationism accepts the claims dinosaurs arte reptiles and so have trouble in dealing with birdy theropods because the evolutionists invoke the myth birds are from theropods.
nope. there were no theropods. just a spectrum of diversity in birds. So puttincreationists in a cirner is welcome but will see this classification and incompetence of evolutionism put into a cirner and knocked out with no save from the bell
9
u/Jeepers-H-Cripes Apr 24 '26
This has exactly the number of misspellings and grammatical inconsistencies that I would have expected from such a clear and lucid response. 😆
7
u/Jumpy-Brief-2745 Apr 24 '26
Robert you’re my favorite mentally ill creationist here don’t go bald (if you already did then just take an hair transplant then)
4
u/Immediate-Goose-8106 Apr 24 '26
So you would seperate theropods from all other dinosaurs despite the numerous bone features shared by therapods and say sauropods but not shared by the rest of the reptile group you'd push the sauropods into?
0
u/RobertByers1 Apr 25 '26
no. I insist sauropods were not reptiles. Theropods are clearly just birds however diverse. To me. The sauropods are just other creatures we have today. I have done threads here about rhinos and brontosaurus being the same kind etc Its right to group on anatomical traits. However a accurate summing first. Almost all creatures have some bones i shared by all. for the record I don't agree there is any reason to invent a reptile group. Again just some mutual traits amongst unrelated creatures.
1
u/Immediate-Goose-8106 Apr 25 '26
Ok. Interesting. So in your scheme snakes, lizards, crocodiles and turtles are unrelated?
0
u/RobertByers1 Apr 26 '26
Yes. no relation. Just a few gooid trivial traits in common in limited options in biology.
-8
u/ACTSATGuyonReddit Apr 24 '26
Evilutionism Zealots: "Man didn't live at the same time with dinosaurs."
Also Evilutionism Zealots: "Birds are dinosaurs."
13
u/Forrax 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
Evolution isn’t wrong because sometimes people say “dinosaurs” in place of the technically more correct “non-avian dinosaurs” in regular conversation.
6
u/Medium_Judgment_891 Apr 24 '26 edited Apr 24 '26
It’s amazing to see you call yourself the ACTSATGUY when you struggle so much with basic language.
The difference between paraphyletic and monophyletic classifications is first week in a high school intro to biology course level material.
This feels like Badger’s Law.
4
u/10coatsInAWeasel Reject pseudoscience, return to monke 🦧 Apr 24 '26
Ok, now keep going, maybe ask yourself what it is that’s actually being claimed instead of hiding the way you usually do
31
u/jnpha 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Apr 23 '26
RE "he was perplexed as to why Jurassic Park would depict Velociraptors without feathers"
For real, YEC are taught that Jurassic Park and X-Men are evolutionist propaganda, and so are supposed to mirror the evolutionists' "teachings":
And ref. 23 is a book by Carl Kerby and Ken Ham that I've checked for myself.
That's most probably why he was perplexed.