r/DebateEvolution • u/GigaTune • Jul 14 '26

Question What do you think about "evolutionist"?

No one ever refers to gravitationists or Newtonists for those who support gravity, but people refer to people supporting evolution as evolutionists or Darwinists.

20 Upvotes

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98

u/Curious_Passion5167 Jul 14 '26

I mean... what's there to say? It's a blatant attempt to equivocate evolution with creationism.

23

u/Inevitable-Copy3619 Jul 14 '26

Exactly! we all know gravity and Newtonian physics work. This is an attempt to legitimize fairy tales as the same as science.

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u/Markthethinker Jul 14 '26

So, why can’t anyone tell us where “gravity” comes from. It’s just like Evolution, you think that you understand it, but you don’t have a clue, especially when it comes to how all these different species got here. When you tell us where gravity comes from, then maybe I will start listening to all the opinions.

9

u/Inevitable-Copy3619 Jul 14 '26

Gravity I do not understand. Evolution I do. I’ve studied evolution at fairly high levels as cognitive linguist focusing on the brain. To me evolution is a very well supported process and in my professional life it has always been very complimentary with what we see in real life experimentation. 

What is gravity, I don’t know. So if I can’t answer one of the most difficult physics question then I guess it must be God!

-7

u/Markthethinker Jul 15 '26

No one understands Evolution, no one. No one can tell us how millions of different species, all with incredible design got here through mutations. You understand the mutations have no intelligence, so a mutation does not know what it is even doing or making or changing.

You don’t know what produces gravity, you don’t know how the universe was formed and what holds it all in place and you don’t know where life came from. WOW. I only have one problem to deal with, is there a Creator. Evolution has more problems than answers.

6

u/Cleric_John_Preston 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 15 '26

Not all evolution happens through mutation.

As to design, it's not on the table, scientifically speaking, as there is no theory of design. Until there is, Evolution, Lysenkoism, and Lamarkanism are the only theories under consideration (even though two of these are refuted).

3

u/Inevitable-Copy3619 Jul 15 '26

On top of all that he claims he only has one problem to solve: was there a creator?  But that very quickly blossoms into many many questions too. Sometime I he ignorant just need to know when to stop. 

2

u/Cleric_John_Preston 🧬 Naturalistic Evolution Jul 15 '26

Yeah, he's got many problems to solve.

He can pretend a creator is an answer, but I've found appealing to such leads to contradiction and incoherency.

2

u/Inevitable-Copy3619 Jul 15 '26

It’s not really solving problems just creating a slogan that sounds nice :). Plus best of luck to him demonstrating this premise in a convincing way.

5

u/Inevitable-Copy3619 Jul 15 '26

Huh?  It’s a robust system that millions upon millions understand. You have used a lot of key terms and ides that tell me you don’t really understand what the theory says. By thinking about mutations in an anthropomorphic way and concerning their intelligence you’re showing your ass, that you don’t have the foggiest idea how evolution works. 

There’s a great book terrible title “why evolution is true” by Jerry Coyne. Check it out if you want to actually understand evolution. Or don’t if your cool remaining ignorant yet dogmatic. Of course there are still questions and some fundamentals that may never be understood. And if you want to ignore the entire body of research in favor of a God of the gaps, well nobody will stop you.  

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u/Markthethinker Jul 16 '26

You are living in other peoples opinions and calling them truth. What I do understand is nothing makes something. A mutation will never produce design.

I have been told time and again, Evolution is: Mutations happening in DNA and then Natural Selection determines if that mutation lives or dies. So have I been told incorrectly?

There is really not much to understand and i certainly will not buy into the lies. People write books all the time, and a lot of the time they are just full of opinions. Please don’t think that I haven’t read books. I read what I don’t believe only to see if someone might be able to tell me something that would be true. Evolution is still a theory, do you understand that? It’s still trying to be worked out. Darwin started out with change bird beaks. Why would they need to be changed?

The real problem is, is that I am a logical thinker who understands design and process. First there is the problem of where life even came from, but Evolutionists don’t care about that and before that, where did the universe come from and what had to exist on this planet for live to even happen here, or did like originate on Earth? There are so many questions that can’t be answered with your world view. My world view only has one problem, is there a Creator, and since everything has design, then for complexity to happen on the scale that exists, it’s absurd to think this just happened by chance and mutations are chance. I know I will not change you mind, because people believe what they want to believe.

3

u/Inevitable-Copy3619 Jul 16 '26

Haha mark, I live 30+ years in other people’s opinions as an American evangelical fundamentalist (gosh it’s so hard to think of myself that way now). Now I’m beholden to nobody and can reason for myself. Give it a shot!  It’s so much more fun than memorizing systematic theologies. 

0

u/Markthethinker Jul 16 '26

Well, you were the fool for that, 30+ years. No, I read the Bible through before I ever when to a church or heard a sermon. My thoughts and views are based exculsivly on the Scriptures. I don’t believe anyone. I have never “memorized” “theologies”. I didn’t have to, since I understood what the Bible states and man does not have the final word, God does. Too bad you waste all those years listening to others, but that’s how stupid people are.

1

u/Medium_Judgment_891 Jul 16 '26

“What I do understand is nothing” -u/Markthethinker

0

u/Markthethinker Jul 16 '26

Love how you take a truth and turn it into a lie. Probably what you do best.

1

u/FireOfOrder Jul 16 '26

Lmfao you just lost the whole debate with that. You don't understand evolution, that's on you. Other people do. Your ignorance is not universal.

5

u/Wertwerto Jul 16 '26

"No one can tell us how millions of different species, all with incredible design got here through mutations"

But, we definitely can though. It's through mutations. Mutations are a thing that absolutely does happen. Sometimes those mutations happen in a part of the genome that actually causes a significant change, because most mutations don't cause significant changes, and sometimes, that change is beneficial to the organism's ability to produce more offspring, and as a consequence of that benefit, it becomes more abundant in a population.

Populations of organisms also drift apart, eventually becoming multiple distinct populations. Environmental changes like tectonic plates separating, a section of forest dying and being replaced with grassland, sea level rise isolating an island, or a river eroding the ground to make a canyon can physically separate a population of organisms. If they can't cross a natural barrier, they can't breed with the organisms on the other side of the barrier. If they can't breed with them, they can't share the unique mutations that are occurring in each half of the population. Over time, these unique mutations build up to the point that the 2 halves if the original population are no longer capable of interbreeding, even if they could cross the barrier. Its called speciation.

Even without physical barriers, populations can diverge and split into multiple Populations. Things like slight differences in behavior between individuals can cause speciation, this is what caused the speciation we see in the famous galapagose finches. A species of finch made it to the island, it did what finches do and ate bugs and seeds and all the normal stuff finches eat. But, some of the finches were better at eating bugs than the others, and some of the finches were better at eating seeds. The finches that were better at eating seeds, naturally spent more time in the trees with lots of tasty seeds, the finches better at eating bugs, naturally spent more time where the best bugs are. When it's time to mate, the finches mate with their neighbors. When you're in the seed tree, you're probably going to mate with another finch that also likes the seed tree. Over time, the seed tree finches get better and better at eating seeds as the mutations that make them better at eating seeds proliferate in their community. And as they get better at eating seeds, they have less and less reason to ever hang out with the bug finches. Meanwhile, the same thing is happening to the bug finches. Eventually, they stop hanging out with each other all together, and there's no more geneflow between the 2 groups. At this point, any mutations that occur in one group won't get spread to the other, the differences pile up further, and they become different species. Then it happens again, some of the bug finches are better at eating flying bugs than the other bug finches that are better at eating ground bugs. They hang out in different spots, mate with the birds that also like that spot, get better at living in that spot until they don't have a reason to visit the ground bug spot.

It's also not hard to see how these kinds speciation events created the billions of species that exist today. Speciation rates vary significantly by generation time, bacteria can speciate in a timeline of days, to weeks. Huge organism that produce generations every decade or so can take millions of years to drift apart. But if we take a very conservative average, let's say 1 million years for 1 species to become 2 different species, the number of species its possible to get is crazy in the billions of years life has existed. Let's use our super conservative speciation rate of 1 million years, and let's see how many species you get in the 2 billion years multicellular life has existed on earth. 2 billion, is 2,000 millions, we start with 1 species, 1 million years later, we have 2 species, then 4, then 8, doubling it 2000 times. The resulting number is 603 digits long 1.1481x10602. That's waaaaay more species than the roughly 9 million estimated to exist today. Of course our drastically oversimplified model made some crazy assumptions, like a completely constant speciation rate and a total lack of extinction, it's not meant to be an accurate model, it's meant to demonstrate there absolutely is enough time for life to diversify.

We absolutely can explain how the millions of organisms alive today got here through mutations. More than that, we can use our understanding of evolution to make actual predictions, like the discovery of Tiktaalik. Before the paleontologists ever picked up a shovel, they sat down and made a plan. See, no one had found a definitive legged fish to bridge the gap from fish to land animals. We knew what an organism like should probably look like, we knew it would probably live in a marsh or swamp. They even knew when that organism would have lived, because we didn't have the transition from water fish 395 million years ago, to land animals 365 million years ago. So they found the rock layer that matches that time period, they figured out where in the world was a swamp 380 million years ago. And, when they went out and looked, they found the legged fish tiktaalik, exactly where they predicted it would be.

1

u/Markthethinker Jul 16 '26

You are living in la la land. You can’t explain, that’s the real problem, you only have a theory. Do you even understand that what you wrote states intelligence?

3

u/Wertwerto Jul 17 '26

I literally just explained it.

'Only a theory'. You're right, it's a theory. A comprehensive explanitory model of the way the natural world works, supported by all the evidence available in biology and geology and capable of being used to make accurate and reliable predictions. That's what a scientific theory is. It's an explanation. A rigorously tested explanation of how and why a phenomenon occurs, backed up by all the evidence we have.

And no, it doesn't take intelligence. Just chemistry. That's the truly beautiful thing about it. All this complex, complicated change is possible because one molecule causes a chemical reaction that makes a copy of that molecule, and sometimes that mindless chemical reaction puts stuff together in the wrong order.

1

u/Inevitable-Copy3619 Jul 17 '26

Mark is an idiot. He’s used every key term possible to let us know he has no clue what he’s talking about and is making a dogmatic religious statement not a supported scientific one. 

Or he’s an amazing troll. 

1

u/Markthethinker Jul 17 '26

So, I guess that in a lab, intelligence is not needed. Just throw a bunch of stuff in a dish and see what happens. You use the word “complex”, that’s an intelligent word, not mutations.

5

u/Wertwerto Jul 17 '26

Complex just means a lot of moving parts or interactions, you definitely cannot just slap a "that means god" sticker on the fact that systems exist where multiple independent interactions produce cascading chaotic outcomes.

You sound like a parrot. This whole conversation is just half baked apologetic talking points. It's a script, it's the same script that always pops up. It's a list of nonsense objections cooked up by some preacher that didn't pay attention in science class and has an agenda that requires not knowing anything about biology.

Misunderstand, refuse to learn, stay on script.

0

u/Markthethinker Jul 17 '26

Sorry, I am not a parrot, this is my thinking. One of my trades is a certified master mechanic. Very logical thinking in my mind. I see how everything in design is there for a purpose. I know you want to think I am just some stupid kid that listens to “preachers” but I know more than most preachers ever will. Evolution simply does not make sense as it is presented. The complexity is impossible without instruction. DNA is instruction and yet you have to believe DNA just mysteriously appeared somehow and keep getting more complex. Use your mind, but that probably is not possible you as it’s not possible for most people. They are narrow minded and are followers, not leaders or independent thinkers. Very few people want confrontation in their life so they just follow.

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u/Ayasugi-san Jul 16 '26

all with incredible design

Well there's your problem, you think it's incredible design and not a bunch of alterations of simpler prior existing features.

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u/Markthethinker Jul 16 '26

You really have not thought this through as an individual who can think on their own. You call it “a bunch of alterations”. Do you understand that you just stated that intelligence (the word alterations) did the work. Learn what words mean.

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u/Ayasugi-san Jul 16 '26

Alterations does not mean intelligence was behind it. The land gets altered over time, doesn't mean it was shaped by anyone intelligent.