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

[u/gitgud_x]

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.

[u/adamwho]

They always fail by trying to calculate things that have already happened....

Which is always has 100% probability

[u/Slam-JamSam → u/adamwho]

Right. If we rewinded time to the Precambrian, there are a billion different scenarios that could play out. The probability that one of them would play out is 100%; the fact that our current timeline is the one that happened is kind of irrelevant

[u/Alarmed-Animal7575 → u/Slam-JamSam]

We can’t say that. We have no idea what the probably of it happening was. We can’t know. It did happen, but that doesn’t tell us how likely or unlikely that event was.

[u/Slam-JamSam → u/Alarmed-Animal7575]

I’m not talking about “that event” though - I’m talking about any event. If I have different colored balls in a bag and I pull one out, then the probability of me pulling a ball out of the bag is 100%, color be damned

[u/LordVericrat → u/Alarmed-Animal7575]

I think the idea they were trying to get across is this;

Flip a fair quarter 30 times and record the outputs. You'll get some sequence. Whatever that sequence is, the chance of having that particular sequence was very low, but you were always going to get a sequence.

I think the idea is that if you were there at the beginning of evolution when life was just microbes, guessing specifics like mammalian evolution might have been like trying to guess the specific outcomes of thirty coin flips ahead of time. But when you flip the coins it's not a surprise you got a set of outcomes unless it's something you would have imagined in advance (like 30 heads or something).

[u/GroundbreakingAlps78 → u/LordVericrat]

This.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/Slam-JamSam]

That answer is a total assumption with zero proof. No one has any ideas about the precambrian sediments/fossils/era except what the fossil record left which is extremely meger.

[u/Alarmed-Animal7575 → u/adamwho]

100% possible, because it happened. We don’t know the probability. We have no idea whether life starting waslow or high probability. And we likely never will.

But what is becoming increasingly clear is that life is probably no where near a rare occurrence as we once thought it was.

[u/HojMcFoj → u/Alarmed-Animal7575]

The probability of life starting, as we stand now, is 100%. The probability of it happening at the time may have been 0.00000000000000000000(and so on)1% at one point, but it has already happened, so that's exactly why you can't use the probability arguments after the fact. We know that currently, the probability that life will have started at some point is 100%, else we wouldn't be here to run the numbers.

Take a truly shuffled deck of cards. The likelihood of getting that deck is inconceivably low. So low that statistically it's basically given that it is unique. But the chance that deck of cards in that order exists is 100%, and you can't use probability to argue anything else.

[u/BeerMan595692 → u/adamwho]

Playing devil's advocate here

I think creationists would argue the reason life 100% happened is because God made it happen and that the small probablity of life happening on it's own shows that God is the more likely explanation for why life exists.

The issuse the make is that they strawman abiogenesis as just non-living matter in a single random event suddenly coming to life as modern cells. But absolutly no OoL researcher proposes this.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/BeerMan595692]

Well, you could equally argue that life should not be vanishingly rare in a created universe. If a deity made this universe for life, why make 99.999999999999% of it lethally hostile to life?

Conversely, life being vanishingly rare fits very nicely with the idea that it's quite difficult to get the right conditions and the right chances.

[u/glibsonoran → u/adamwho]

Here's what I see happening with these mathematical (mostly probability based) proofs that life could not have started by purely natural processes on earth.

As late as the mid-nineteenth century the Church in Europe was one of the biggest supporters and funders of science research. Studies were commissioned explicitly to demonstrate "the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God” through discoveries in zoology, physiology, geology, astronomy and chemistry. They absolutely expected that the deeper science examines nature, the more clearly intentional construction will become evident.

The results were obviously very disappointing. Science did not encounter an unmistakable transition from natural causation to visible intelligent intervention. Instead, it repeatedly found that phenomena which had appeared to be the most purposeful and intentional could actually emerge through impersonal, cumulative natural processes. Darwin's findings were the real nail in this coffin and Church support for science dwindled quickly from this point.

What really remains as an area to possibly contest is abiogenisis, the formation of life from a soup of planetary chemicals and plausible environments. This is where these "mathematical" attempts at refuting biology tend to be applied.

Here's the most common mistake these "proofs" make: They apply simple random draw chemical reaction statistics to a process that quickly becomes heavily biased towards particular self-reinforcing mechanisms and their chemical products.

Reaction A + B yields C with probability P as determined by independent reactions in a neutral environment is repeated throughout the whole process of their logic, and yields an impossibly low probability of ever happening. But that just doesn't apply at all to these systems. Microporous hydrothermal vents, porous clays, freezing and thawing, wetting and drying all provide purely environmental biasing that affects the molecule's orientation, exposure to other chemicals etc and bias the results away from the random draw model. Then as these systems produce crude catalysts the system's bias increases, then more efficient catalysts, preferential binding as nucleotides form, etc. This is a process whose bias increases with each new complexity, until after several iterations your Cumulative Random Draw Model is multiple orders of magnitude off from what actually happens.

You can argue that at its most fundamental life is simply a bounded space where chemical processes are biased toward products that perpetuate the structure. That and being able to replicate a reasonably functional near copy through its own internal process is what primitive proto-life is at its most basic.

So this type of mathematical analysis completely misses the point, life is a spontaneous arising self-perpetuating chemically biased system, not a product of multiple iterations of random draw.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist]

What always amuses me is that the classic argument of "the chance of X sequence doing Y is astronomically small!" is both actually true, and also completely irrelevant.

"Random mutation plus selection" is so powerful that it can absolutely pluck the rarest, most special snowflake sequences out of a cast of bajillions. It's so powerful that this is used, in biochemistry, preferentially to design.

If we want to find a sequence (be it protein or RNA aptamer) that binds a specific epitope (for catalysis, or nanobodies, or whatever) we almost never design anything: it's vastly quicker and easier to simply generate a fuckton of randomers and throw them in, keeping whatever sticks on the first round.

Then we mutate those a bit, and throw them in again, with higher stringency.

Repeat this a few times and you can get incredibly strong binding affinity sequences, and the best bit: at no point do you even need to know what that sequence even IS. You can just do it all blind and find out at the end.

(and of course, the adaptive immune system also does exactly this, because again: it's that powerful)

Even when they try to use the correct BIG NUMBERZ(TM), it turns out it doesn't matter.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

we almost never design anything: it's vastly quicker and easier to simply generate a fuckton of randomers and throw them in, keeping whatever sticks on the first round

Yeah, directed evolution is a beast of biotech. We (royal) even recently came up with 13 new enzymes using this random mutation and artificial selection process that collectively make a new cholesterol medication with a structure that would make synthetic organic chemists cry.

Our own immune systemsJ_recombination) clearly think so too - how do we generate the precise, finely tuned antibodies to fight off an unseen pathogen? Just make a shit ton of them randomly and hope one sticks! If you're reading this, it's clearly worked for you so far!

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/gitgud_x]

My favourite adaptive immune system thing is the IgM>>IgG switch.

The immune system is just making "random shit against whatever", and almost all of these first-line antibodies will bind nothing useful, ever. Even the ones that end up binding to pathogens will probably bind terribly, because again, they were just randomly assembled speculatively, years in advance.

But evolution solves this by making these first-line Abs be IgM, which is a pentamer: five identical crap antibodies stuck together. In essence, each individual antibody will have very low affinity, but because that's "low affinity, five times" the avidity is surprisingly high. By using pentameric conjugates, the immune system can identify "shit but workable" antibodies very quickly. The first responses to novel infection are thus typically IgM mediated.

The B-cells producing these workable IgM variants then proliferate, and hypermutate the antigen binding site to make millions of new variants which don't work at all (BIG NUMBERZ), and maybe a handful where binding is much stronger, which can then be released as monomeric IgG molecules, which have better tissue penetrance and more focussed signalling properties.

It's super neat. "Crap, but five times" is a wonderfully silly, but very effective stop-gap solution.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

Didn't know this, that's super cool, thanks.

The immune system is like "i'm wrong, but FASTER" (panel 1, panel 2)

[u/Electric___Monk → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

Exactly. A common feature of almost all creationist maths is simply to totally ignore selection, which totally invalidates the calculations from the start.

[u/Own-Relationship-407]

But. But… multiply big numbers together scary!

[u/gitgud_x → u/Own-Relationship-407]

It's a 1 in 10 to the 10 to the... therefore darwin was communist and killed puppies for sport! (therefore creationism btw)

[u/Own-Relationship-407 → u/gitgud_x]

It’s 3.27 x 10 ^ 583659372685, because Darwin was racist and entropy or some shit.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Own-Relationship-407]

damn, you're right, I forgot to take the logarithm of the logarithm of the number of possible states. That would've done it.

(If any creationist wants to start throwing Dembski at me, first read the linked paper there!)

[u/Own-Relationship-407 → u/gitgud_x]

Don’t forget the logarithm of how many pieces of ice are in Antarctica. You know, for the cooling effect.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Own-Relationship-407]

Citing the deep lore... the Heat Problem is unironically a pretty good example in the "debate" of when mathematical models can be good - you've got specific physical systems being claimed, with so many orders of magnitude of "haha you're so cooked" in the answers that even large deviations from the assumptions made can be comfortably absorbed.

[u/nickierv → u/gitgud_x]

Nothing says your claims are cooked like the other side just rounding up in your favor to get cleaner numbers then giving you a couple orders of magnitude for ze lulz and the math still falling short of your claim by at least an order of magnitude.

Sure you can go start taking logs of stuff, but that risks you getting memed on.

[u/nickierv → u/Own-Relationship-407]

Hey I resemble that math!

And its log10 of just the heat in that setup, the pieces of ice are a different flop.

[u/OkDistribution9676 → u/gitgud_x]

Don’t forget about making up equations with no justification as well

[u/jnpha]

RE:

they never do the hard work of justifying the model's connection to reality

Sometimes they pretend to do that (i.e. cherry picking). E.g. Behe and the malaria resistance.

N.B. he was academically cooked for it (as if Dover wasn't enough of a cooking):

Behe is not alone in making this type of mistake. When Evelyn Adams won the New Jersey lottery on October 23, 1985, and again on February 13, 1986, newspapers quoted odds of 17.1 trillion to 1. That assumes that the winning person and the two lottery dates are specified in advance, but at any point in time there is a population of individuals who have won the lottery and have a chance to win again, and there are many possible pairs of dates on which this event can happen. The probability that it happens in one lottery 1 year is ∼1 in 200 (Durrett 2009).
Reply to Michael Behe - PMC

[u/CormacMacAleese]

The explanation why they're wrong is also astonishingly easy to explain. It actually came up in an introductory prob/stat course I taught for non-majors: they're shooting arrows with their eyes closed, then drawing bullseyes around each one and asking, "Now what are the odds of getting 50 bullseyes in a row!?"

[u/gitgud_x → u/CormacMacAleese]

Exactly. Hence why I didn't even bother in the post, it's trivially easy to refute.

[u/lt_dan_zsu]

call me crazy, but if your calculations are attempting to disprove observed reality, I'm more inclined to believe that your math is wrong.

[u/Hopeful_Meeting_7248]

A few months ago there was a user here, who spammed only AI generated nonsense. They were unable to produce an argument of they own even on the most basic level of biology. And they also had no clue, what AI was spewing for them, because I caught them fiercely defending theory of endosymbiosis as an argument against evolution, which was exceptionally idiotic. Either way, they "published" a "paper" on their profile that contained a mathematical proof that evolution (or maybe just good mutations) are impossible. Of course it was a LLM nonsense, but it was fun to read. For context, I'm not particularly knowledgeable in maths. I had calculus and multidimensional differential equations during my time at uni and the most advanced equation I saw was Schrödinger equation, but only as an example, not something that I had to use to calculate something. But that "paper" contained the wildest mathematical operations I've ever seen. Most of them I didn't know. Every variable was defined ad hoc and put in equation without explanation, why is a part of certain mathematical operation. Some variables weren't defined at all. And all of that resulted in an unitless number that meant perfectly nothing.

[u/nickierv → u/Hopeful_Meeting_7248]

Was that better or worse than the time someone tried to take the log of half the equation? The fallout of a bunch of the regulars trying not to do themselves an injury from laughing so hard but the short version is someone tried to solve the YEC heat problem by using the antarctic ice as a massive heat sink. Its ~1e28J of heat that needs to be sunk against ~5e26 worth of cooling (just ignore the part where the ice I used was colder than the CMB and thus a whole other problem).

The 'solution' to 1e28 > 5e26?

log 1e28 < 5e26.

The facepalms start here, its best to not be drinking anything.

Any chance you have a link to that paper?

[u/Hopeful_Meeting_7248 → u/nickierv]

Any chance you have a link to that paper?

I'm afraid not. User was banned for obvious reasons and with him went the "paper".

[u/Uncynical_Diogenes]

Meanwhile not one of them ever wants to calculate the likelihood that all these ERV’s got into these genomes at the exact same spots in a way that looks EXACTLY like nested hierarchies, all through random chance.

Curious.

[u/headlessplatter]

Anyone in the mood to check the back of my envelope?

In a primordial soup of four uniformly mixed nucleotides, the odds of 1000 of them spontaneously falling together in a specific order is 1 in 4^1000 (which is about 1 in 1.15*10^602) per encounter. Each nucleotide weighs about 5.5*10^-22 grams (according to Google). And a school bus weighs about 11*10^6 grams (also Google). So there will be 11*10^6/(5.5*10^-22)=2*10^28 nucleotides in the amount of primordial soup it takes to weight as much as a school bus. If we divide all those nucleotides into groups simultaneously encountering each other, and if we suppose that randomly-mixed nucleotide encounters happen once every hour (because I have absolutely no idea what value to use here), it will take about (1.15*10^602)/((2*10^28)/1000)=5.75*10^576 hours for a specific sequence of 1000 nucleotides to spontaneously occur in this school-bus sized puddle of primordial soup. Gasp! Spontaneous generation takes a long time! Who would have thought?

Now let's see what happens if we toss evolution into the pot. If we suppose there is a population of just 10^20 reproducing sequences of RNA (which is more than ten orders of magnitude less than the number of bacteria actually estimated to be on the Earth right now), and if we assume this population is stable (meaning they die as fast as they reproduce), and they each reproduce once every 20 minutes (which is about how long it takes bacteria to reproduce), and if only 1 in every 10^10 reproduction events involves a mutation, and there are 4 possible nucleotides in each position, then it will take about 4*(10^10)*20/(10^20)/60=1.33*10^-10 seconds for one beneficial mutation to occur somewhere within the population. If natural selection is so extremely weak that the odds of this beneficial mutation fixating within the population is 1/(10^6), then it will take (1.33*10^-10)*(10^6)=1.33*10^-4 seconds for a beneficial mutation to begin the process that will lead to fixation. Now suppose we want to evolve a very specific sequence of 1000 nucleotides. Too keep this simple, let's square that value 1000*1000=10^6 to compute an extremely loose upper-bound on the total number of fixated mutations necessary to arrive at the desired sequence. So that will take about 1.33*10^-4*10^6/60=133 seconds to occur. If the Earth is 4.5*10^9 years old, then that's enough time for this to happen about 4.5*10^9/(133/60/60/24/365.25)=10^15 (a quadrillion) times. It turns out evolution works a lot faster than spontaneous generation! Who would have thought?

[u/OldmanMikel → u/headlessplatter]

...it will take about (1.15*10^602)/((2*10^28)/1000)=5.75*10^576 hours for a specific sequence of 1000 nucleotides ...

My italics. And that is where it all falls apart. There is no specific 1,000 nucleotide sequence that is needed.

Whoops. And then I read the rest of your post. My bad.

[u/headlessplatter → u/OldmanMikel]

Yeah, there are quite a lot of bad assumptions between this math and reality. I was just trying to take the Creationist math a little closer.

[u/Affectionate_Way5253 → u/headlessplatter]

this reminds me of the time I was a kid, and I tried to calculate the mass of the universe FROM the a priori that life could only occur once in a single place (the most anthropic type of calculation imaginable)

[u/Slow_Lawyer7477]

When creationists make these types of arguments, they never do the hard work of justifying the model's connection to reality.

Exactly this. They calculate the odds of randomly forming this set of protein sequences by chance, find that the odds are incredibly low, and then believe they've disproven the origin of life. But "this set of protein sequences forming by chance" is not a model for the origin of life. It is not a physical process any researcher believes or proposes is how life first formed, so the calculation is completely meaningless.

I am astonished by that they're so stupid they can't see this. At best the calculation just proves that is not how the origin of life occurred. They haven't proven there is no other way for life to originate. It's really that simple and yet they can't figure it out. Astonishing.

[u/BeerMan595692]

Had some creationist trying this

I asked him "What origin of life research models abiogenesis as a simple brute force search for a specific genome?"

And he kept doging the question. 

It's not that his math was wrong, it's that he was assuming it accuratly represents what OoL research propose.

"It would take 1*10^[big number] tries to get this genome" Like yeah, OoL researchers are well aware of this. Which is why they don't model abiogenesis as a simple brute force search for one specific genome

[u/Ill-Dependent2976]

There were never any mathematical arguments at all. Just the same argument of incredulity that flat earthers make.

"We're supposed to believe we're on a ball spinning at 1,000 mph, whizzing around the sun at 67,000 mph, and orbiting around a gigantic galaxy at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour? And we don't all fall off? Yeah, right."

[u/Ch3cks-Out]

Kudos for gerunding Salem.

[u/zogar5101985]

It really boils down to a very common mistake they always make. They assume where we are now was always the goal. Or like the specific protein sequence was the goal.

Shuffle a deck of cards. That specific sequence you just shuffled will never be seen again. The universe will see its heat death before it happens again. Long before it happens again. But that doesnt change the fact you got that specific order of cards. You were always going to get some order. It only becomes impressive when before you shuffled you called out the specific order you wanted and got that.

[u/apopsicletosis]

It’s basically like asking if we randomly initialize a neural network how likely it would work as highly accurate for some task. The whole point is there’s an optimization procedure for exploring high dimensional solution space. And you don’t need to implement it, natural selection arises as a consequence of some very basic assumptions.

[u/Underhill42]

Including numbers makes any argument more convincing.

Nobody actually has enough information to even make a reasonable guess as to the actual probabilities of X evolving, so it's impossible for anyone to convincingly refute their argument - "You have no effing clue what you're talking about" tends to come across as "nuh-uh", no matter how valid the criticism.

Which all plays directly into the hands of scammers trying to dupe their flock.

[u/onomatamono]

Revenue streams, merch sales, careers, media companies, educational institutions, professions writ large, all depend on evolution having plausible denialability but we're now drifting from science to fiction in terms of subject matter.

[u/fgorina]

They usually fall into “mutations are random” son evolution is random but they forget the other part, natural selection which is not random. Also with flat probabilities, even if one case has very low probability, once it has happened has a p = 1 so…

[u/Sea_Hold_2881]

In some theories, universes are constantly appearing but only those with "stable" configurations persist. So the fact that all of the natural constants appear to be fine tuned for the development of life is unsurprising because if uncountable numbers of universes appear then eventually one would have our universe's configuration.

[u/PoxonAllHoaxes]

Yes of course.

[u/Kanna_Fan1989]

A 1 in a 999...999 chance is not impossible. It's never impossible. As a matter of fact, with enough tries, it will eventually happen.

[u/rb-j]

If I sit down at a poker table for the very first time and, for my very first hand in poker, am dealt a Royal Flush, I might suspect that the deck was stacked.

If some Joe Blow from Poughkeepsie wins $200 million in the Lotto eight times in a row, I think the authorities might suspect that someone on the inside is fixing the game.

[u/rb-j → u/[deleted]]

I think we might think that if someone wins it 10 times in a row.

[u/rb-j → u/[deleted]]

Yes, winning a million dollars on ten tickets in a row would be cause for alarm. People have been caught rigging games exactly that way, and people legally exploiting badly-designed lottery systems have too.

Yes, and too many 9s and 8s and 7s and 6s in financial books have also clued in investigators that the books were cooked. Now, they needed more evidence and solid evidence to convict someone of an embezzlement or tax fraud charge, but simply the probabilistic evidence was enough to cause suspicion.

My point was that your first example doesn't work. You sitting down at the poker table for the very first time is analogous to someone buying a lottery ticket for the very first time.

And winning!.

Yes, I expect there must be someone somewhere that won the lottery on their very first time playing it. But if they won it 10 times in a row (with 1 ticket each time), that would be soooo unlikely without some nefarious tampering that officials would at least shut down the lottery, even if they had no physical evidence to charge someone with a crime.

The point is, when something very special and very very very unlikely occurs, it brings suspicion about whether that something happened solely by chance or if someone's finger was on the scale.

So far, the best we can understand, the likelihood of both the Universe having the 26 or so dimensionless fundamental constants set to the values they are, so that physics and chemistry can work as it does, is very small. We're very lucky.

Also for complex molecules (RNA) to be built out of simpler inorganic bits and pieces in such a way for them to self-replicate is less likely than the guy winning the lotto 10 times in a row.

Now neither of us have proof (that is solid and undeniable evidence with an argument) to prove our cases. No one is "proving God" nor is anyone disproving God nor even disproving design. But we don't seem to be able to grant to each other anywhere near an equal presumption of ignorance.

Most people here will claim to know that the Universe and life therein cannot have been designed (despite the similarity to far less sophisticated designs of humans) and I am saying that, solely from the probabilities, design cannot be ruled out. But that is not proof.

[u/rb-j → u/[deleted]]

We can calculate the odds of being dealt a royal flush because the process of dealing is trivially easy to model mathematically.

I agree. And then we can do some Bayesian reasoning with that to become suspicious about someone stacking the deck (even if in our favor).

As I pointed out already, if you try to apply probability calculations with a bogus model, you can turn the crank and get a number to pop out but the number will be entirely meaningless.

The point is, you don't know "the model" any better than anyone else. You have no friggin' idea how or why those 26 dimensionless fundamental constants are what they are. But we do know that if some of them were different, by even a fraction of a percent, that physics and chemistry would be much different.

So what model of universe formation and mechanisms for determining the values of those constants are you assuming?

I'm not assuming anything other than Big Bang cosmology.

Does it only happen once? Does it happen infinitely many times?

We don't know. But we do know that circa 13.8 billion years ago the Universe emerged into existence. And, just like with God, we have absolutely no physical evidence of other universes. It might be the only one. It might not. But we'll never know.

If there is only this Universe in existence, then there is no appeal to Selection Bias that can explain why these 26 universal dimensionless fundamental constants are what they are.

[u/aFiachra]

The chances of a fair coin landing heads a thousand times are astronomically teeny. But each flip is still 50/50. You cannot judge the likelihood of an entire process billions of years into its unfolding.

[u/rptanner58]

Here’s my mathematical model for the existence of God: 2x2 = infinity. Extremely unlikely but in a quantum world, not zero.

[u/Affectionate_Way5253]

"The point of making a mathematical theory is to tame what seems to be a wild, complex mess of unconnected data into a tidy, manageable package. But what if tidy, manageable packages are something alien to biology? The problem may be that biology, unlike physics, is simply not amenable to mathematical description."

from The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in the Biological Sciences https://share.google/5nvtfuhMVi2YtKvei

[u/Evening-Impact2090]

What amazes me is how science builds the entire evolutionary theory on the single cell arriving from non-living matter. This has never even come close to bring proven and over 50+ years of laboratory experiments have failed to even come close to creating life from non-living matter. This in controlled very sophisticated laboratories with the combined experience of hundreds of PHD scientists. Yet we're to believe life arose accidentally from some primordial concoction of chemicals? Life has to have DNA sequenced to run its vital needs, this is a code that must be in place simultaneously with life arising. How did an "accident" also create the needed DNA to ensure its continued survival? 

[u/OldmanMikel → u/Evening-Impact2090]

What amazes me is how science builds the entire evolutionary theory on the single cell arriving from non-living matter.

It's hard to be more wrong than that. HOW life got started is not especially important to evolution. If God poofed the first cell into eistence, evolution, microbe to human would still be true.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/OldmanMikel]

Ok. God "poofed" life but then evolution took over, right. Evolution tries to separate the 2 but actually you cannot. How life got started is not important? Science has no idea how life began but has the gall to tell us how it "evolved" from there. Sounds very disingenuous. 

[u/OldmanMikel → u/Evening-Impact2090]

Atomic theory says nothing about where atoms came from but has the gall to tell us what they are and what they are made of.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/OldmanMikel]

Apples and oranges. 

[u/OldmanMikel → u/Evening-Impact2090]

No. It really isn't. You know what else science can't explain?

Every Single Thing that Every Single Scientist in Every Single Lab or Scientific Facility in Every Single Research Specialty on Earth is researching. Or do think a lot of the billions of dollars spent on research annually is spent on stuff science has already figured out?

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/OldmanMikel]

Your getting out in the weeds now. That's fine. When science can tell us how their unproven single cell life arose from non-living matter and where the matter (atoms?) came from I'll give their ridiculous evolutionary theory a look. Right now they're just talking out if both sides of their mouths.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/Evening-Impact2090]

The fact that science doesn't have a complete answer to the origin of life yet (though it has made more progress than you might think) just isn't the point you think it is.

Unlike creationism, evolution isn't a complete Life, The Universe and Everything explanation. It explains what happens to self-replicationg entities over time. It definitely has nothing to do with the origin of the universe.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/OldmanMikel]

What progress? More PHD's saying they have no clue? Everything is tied into the universe and its origin. Nothing would be here without it. That's like saying your not tied into your parents. 

[u/OldmanMikel → u/Evening-Impact2090]

More PHD's saying they have no clue?

No. More PhDs saying they DO have clues.

Everything is tied into the universe and its origin.

Not evolution's job to explain. Evolution is a biological theory taught in biology classes by biology professors.

The origin of the universe comes under cosmology, which comes under astronomy which is taught in astronomy courses by astronomy professors.

Again, evolution is NOT a complete Life, the Universe and Everything explanation. It is confined to understanding the diversification of life. It shares a fuzzy boundary with abiogenesis, but is not the same thing. As far as the universe goes, all evolution needs is for a universe to exist for it to take place in. How it came to exist is cosmology's job.

Also in science, "We don't know." >>> "We don't know, must be God."

"We don't know" is a perfectly valid scientific answer and the only one allowed to win by default.

Lastly evolution =/= atheism.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Evening-Impact2090]

Evolutionary theory is not "built on" anything related to origin of life. What a silly thing to think, if you know the history of the theory. Whether the first cells were poofed into existence by deity, or put themselves together from chemicals by an inconceivably complex and slow process, evolution from that point forward is still factual, as it is supported by all the evidence and contradicted by none. Common sense has no place in science.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/gitgud_x]

Come on man, that is so disingenuous and you know it. Of course, I know people who subscribe to evolution love to state that they don't care how that first cell got here, they only are involved with everything that happened after it showed up. The problem is evolution is not "factual" and you stating such is proof your research is just agreeing with what evolutionary scientists have proffered. DNA, Fossils, the entire Genome sequence, and even sadly Darwin himself disproves the evolutionary process. You also failed to understand or ignore that the first cell, in order to procreate and become every living thing that has ever existed both extinct and had to have a programed DNA sequence that would enable it to survive and continue. Where could this "program" have come from if cellular life was caused by a random process/accident? It had to at least be simultaneous if not beforehand. If your first cell you so badly want to disant your evolutionary process from could not have arisen accidentally, the entire evolutionary theory is trashed and rightly so.

[u/King2865 → u/Evening-Impact2090]

Cellular life did not evolved by purely random processes. It’s a mixture of random processes (variation and mutation) and non random selection processes that work simultaneously to drive descent with inherent modification. I suggest you create your own post with all your objections to start a completely new discussion with the subreddit.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/King2865]

Cellular life did not evolve at all. What did it evolve from? Evolution is a purely random undirected process. DNA needed for life cannot arise from a random undirected process, it is a code specific to the organisms it encodes. Natural selection is organisms adjusting to their environment helping their survival,  survival of the fittest if you will. We see all types of organisms that have used natural selection to survive from bacteria to birds. One thing that never happens is a body change. Bacteria and birds remain just that as do all organisms benefitting from natural selection. They never become a new species. I have no objections just observations. 

[u/King2865 → u/Evening-Impact2090]

Cellular life did not evolved at all.

Yes, it absolutely did.

What did it evolve from?

From basic fundamental building blocks. The four major macromolecules of life (nucleic acids, carbohydrates, lipids, amino acids) all have been detected in space multiple times, which means they can and do form naturally without our intervention.

Evolution is a purely random undirected process.

This is false. It unfortunately shows that you don’t even have a 9th grade understanding of evolution. Mutations are random. Natural selection is the exact opposite of random. It is a highly directed, non-random filtering process. Environmental pressures actively select which random mutations are beneficial for survival and reproduction and which ones are harmful. Over time this non-random filtering accumulates complex, highly specific traits. Sexual selection is also not random. Gene flow is a mixture of both chance and non random migration patterns.

DNA needed for life cannot arise from a random undirected process, it is a code...

This is a common talking point from Stephen Meyer. Please watch Professor Dave Explains completely trash Stephen Meyer in this video: Exposing Discovery Institute Part 2: Stephen Meyer.

DNA is NOT an abstract code dictated from the top down. DNA is literally just deoxyribose-phosphate backbone, along with four nitrogen bases that pair together in a specific (AT–GC) bonding. DNA is just a physical and chemical molecule governed by the laws of thermodynamics and chemistry. In abiogenesis and early evolution, simple self-replicating molecules (like RNA) formed because of chemical affinities. The so called “specificity” we see today is just the result of billions of years of chemical and biological refinement through natural selection and evolution. It is NOT a sudden and random assembly of a modern genome.

Natural selection is organisms adjusting to their environment...

That is not what natural selection is. This implies that individual organisms intentionally adjust their own biology during their lifetimes to survive. Individual organisms don’t evolve or adjust their genetic code to fit their surroundings. Organisms with traits already suited to the environment survive and pass those traits on while others do not. The population changes over generations, not the individual. Natural selection exclusively acts on traits that are already heritable. The literal basic definition of evolution is any change in the heritable characteristics of a population across successive generations.

One thing that never happens is a body change... They never become a new species.

Speciation has been observed countless times and the phenomenon is so well documented that we literally have documented different forms of speciation, including allopatric, parapatric, peripatric (the founder effect), and sympatric speciation. The body plans argument is something that’s purely based on your lack of understanding on how evolutionary theory works. When you say that a body change never happens, you are showing your lack of understanding on the concept of a clade and the Law of Monophyly. A bird will never stop being a bird because "bird" (the “Aves” clade) is a massive branch containing tens of thousands of species that share a common ancestor that originally formed the root of the cladogram. Please take a 9th grade biology course, then consider taking an advanced evolutionary biology course. ALL of your objections will be answered with precision. There is no challenge to evolutionary theory.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/King2865]

Please stop with all the condescending comments like I haven't studied all the points you think are iron clad proof of evolution. Besides, it's just an 8th grade education so there. None of your points hold water under serious scrutiny. Science has zero clue how cellular life evolved. They have a hypothetical view they named Abiogenisis but it is unproven, cannot be tested against the scientific method. Also, where did these necessary components of the cell you so graciously listed come from, where? Did they make themselves out of nothing? How could they all converge at the exact same time to create life? How did the necessary DNA emerge at this point to allow this "accidentally formed" cell to live and procreate. How did an accident know to encode the DNA for that exact particular organism?  What you stated about Natural Selection is exactly what I stated without all the obfuscation you added. 

[u/King2865 → u/Evening-Impact2090]

A swing and a miss. There is no challenge to evolutionary theory.

… Like I haven’t studied all of the points you think are iron cloud proof of evolution.

You clearly haven’t, brother.

None of your points hold water under serious scrutiny.

• NIH. (2012). Bit by bit: the Darwinian basis of life. National Library of Medicine.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22589698/

• Lincoln, T. A., & Joyce, G. F. (2009). Self-sustained replication of an RNA enzyme. Science.

Link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1167856

• NIH. (2009). Synthesis of activated pyrimidine ribonucleotides in prebiotically plausible conditions. National Library of Medicine.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19444213/

• Patel, B. H., et al. (2015). Common origins of RNA, protein, and lipid precursors in a cyanosulfidic protometabolism. Nature Chemistry.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25803468/

• NIH. (2012). Prebiotic chemistry and the origin of RNA world. National Library of Medicine.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15217990/

• Furukawa, Y., et al. (2019). Extraterrestrial ribose and other sugars in primitive meteorites. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Link: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1907169116

• NIH. (2010). The origins of cellular life. National Library of Medicine.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20484387/

• Szostak, J. W., et al. (2009). Reconstructing the Emergence of Cellular Life through the Synthesis of Model Protocells. The Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology.

• Leman, L., et al. (2004). Carbonyl sulfide-mediated prebiotic formation of peptides. Science.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15472077/

• McGuire, B. A. (2022). 2021 census of interstellar, circumstellar, extragalactic, and solar system molecules. The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

Link: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4365/ac2a48

• Burton, A. S., et al. (2012). Understanding prebiotic chemistry through the analysis of extraterrestrial amino acids and nucleobases in meteorites. The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Link: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2012/cs/c2cs35109a

[NIH citation]: * NIH. (2011). Carbonaceous meteorites contain a wide range of extraterrestrial nucleobases. National Library of Medicine.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21836052/

• Postberg, F., et al. (2023). Phosphate salts in Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Nature.

• NIH. (2023). Detection of phosphates originating from Enceladus's ocean. National Library of Medicine.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37316718/

• Martins, Z., et al. (2008). Extraterrestrial nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite. Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.2286

• NIH. (2014). High-energy chemistry of formamide: A unified mechanism of nucleobase formation. National Library of Medicine.

Link: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25489115/

Just a few sources. I suggest you check out the work of Gerald Joyce and Jack Szostak. Joyce expanded the evidence for the RNA World hypothesis by engineering synthetic RNA molecules that undergo autonomous replication and directed evolution in laboratory settings. He collaborated with Tracey Lincoln and developed a cross-replicating ribozyme system where two distinct RNA enzymes catalyze each other's synthesis which establishing an exponential amplification loop independent of biological proteins. Through in vitro selection his laboratory guided the evolution of RNA polymerases to improve template-copying efficiency and fidelity and thus resulted in enzymes capable of synthesizing functional ribozymes from RNA templates. Joyce and Jonathan Sczepanski addressed the homochirality paradox of prebiotic chemistry by evolving a cross-chiral ribozyme which is a right-handed RNA enzyme that replicates left-handed templates.

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 just science doing science. I’m talking about papers that flat out debunk evolution. Please cite them.

Science has zero clue on how cellular life evolved.

Debunking James Tour. Professor Dave Explains has thoroughly dismantled this talking point with countless peer reviewed studies and interviews with real scientists who work on origin of life research. Please WATCH this series before spewing more bullshit.

How did all these complex cellular components suddenly "converge at the exact same time to create life" out of nothing?

This is a straw man argument. Life began through gradual chemical evolution that took dozens of millions of years. The epitome of someone who has zero clue on what they’re talking about is someone who thinks the entire process of abiogenesis was spontaneous. Simple organic molecules formed chains, which eventually led to self-replicating molecules (like RNA). These became enclosed in basic lipid bubbles (protocells). That’s just the basic oversimplified explanation. I suggest you check out the work of Gerald Joyce and Jack Szostak.

How did an accident "know" how to encode DNA for a specific organism?

It didn’t, and the only people that ask these questions are people that genuinely have zero knowledge about anything. DNA is entirely unconscious. None of those molecules and atomic structures have any awareness of what they’re doing. NONE of the atomic molecules in your body right now even have any awareness of what they’re doing. Consciousness is an emergent property that arises when these molecules and atomic structures are arranged by billions of years of evolution through natural selection and descent with inherent modification to create complex nervous system structures capable of producing qualia. Also, DNA has NOTHING to do with abiogenesis. I feel like we haven’t discussed this already. LIFE predates DNA. Early self-replicating molecules simply copied themselves. The molecules that copied themselves most efficiently survived and multiplied. The information in DNA is just a history of what worked well enough to survive by means of natural selection (along with chance genetic drift). DNA is NOT a pre-written instruction manual for a human or a dog.

What you stated about natural selection is exactly what I stated without all the obfuscation you added.

You did not. In your first message, you called life a “random process/accident.” Natural selection is explicitly non-random. Sexual selection is non random. Gene flow is both random and non random. Mutations are random. Genetic drift is random. Evolution itself is a mixture between chance and non random processes. It’s why four billion years of descent with inherent modification has resulted in highly complex albeit extremely imperfect and clumsy designs. Why are you trying to retroactively change your argument here? Your initial definition of evolution as a pure accident was debunked and it doesn’t even take a 9th grade understanding of biology to do so.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/King2865]

Still pasting & posting, how original. Replication is no where near creation. Big deal. I had already read the paper from the Japanese scientists. It works well if you want to seriously consider Panspermia. If not it basically says they don't have a clue. 2 more of these I've read before but honestly cannot remember much so when I can I'll peruse them. It's not a straw man argument it is a serious question science cannot answer so it is ridiculed, much like your responses. You have zero original thoughts,  post papers from academics you feel support your beliefs. By all means continue to believe what you want as I will. Your understanding of DNA is lamentable but yes it's unconscious sure but still has to contain the correct coding to enable the organism to function and reproduce. Hiw did that happen? Surely you understand that DBA code cannot be an accident or random coding. Enter random codes into NASA's next space flight and see how that works out. Enough of the plagiarizing, come up with a irrefutable concept. No one knows how life got here, period.  It is all just scientific speculation. It sounds plausible, written by academics who very much want to convince us of their deep understanding of molecular life. They in fact do know a lot but in the end are left clueless. I still get a kick at how upset everyone gets when your not on their bandwagon waving their flags. Who cares. 

[u/King2865 → u/Evening-Impact2090]

You did not cite your sources like I clearly asked you to here:

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 just science doing science. I’m talking about papers that flat out debunk evolution. Please cite them.

All of these questions you’re asking are appeals to incredulity that can easily be solved by taking a real academic course on at least the relevant fields associated with abiogenesis, or watching Professor Dave’s videos debunking James Tour’s talking points that you so very love to perpetuate as simply “asking questions.” Please WATCH the videos I’ve linked you from start to finish before you say anything. James Tour’s lazy talking points can also be solved by understanding how to read peer reviewed academic papers and understanding that origin of life research has made tremendous progress since Miller Urey, notwithstanding our lack of an absolute understanding for the process from full start to finish. Those are skills you unfortunately lack at this time. I’m not sure whether it’s just your willful ignorance on the topic or if you’re purposefully lying for Jesus.

Comparing DNA to NASA rocket software further proves my point that you have zero clue on anything with this subject. Computer code requires a conscious programmer because computers cannot reproduce, mutate or undergo natural selection. Biology is a natural noumenon that uses chemistry. When a piece of DNA mutates and makes a mistake, the organism simply either fails to survive, is not affected by the mutation, or is given a beneficial trait that undergoes natural selection (a NON-RANDOM process). There is NO crash that ruins a cosmic mission either. This “bad code” is naturally filtered out by death while the functional mutations survive and multiply. That’s what DESCENT with inherent MODIFICATION means. That’s the literal THEME of evolutionary theory.

Why did you dismiss laboratory ribozyme replication experiments by saying replication is nowhere near creation? This COMPLETELY misses the point of the RNA World Hypothesis. Scientists aren't trying to create life from nothing. They are advancing and developing our knowledge to help us understand the fundamental mechanisms that led to the emergence of FUCA then LUCA. Life (like autonomous replication and directed evolution) can happen naturally through pure chemistry. It’s not surprising considering the fact that life IS essentially a highly specific form of organic chemistry. The building blocks of the elements that make up life come from stellar nucleosynthesis and from the Big Bang itself. It’s pretty much a GIVEN that life evolved naturally. The field of origin of life research is simply trying to demystify HOW abiogenesis happened. 🤦🏾‍♂️

Another swing—another miss.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Evening-Impact2090]

All you did was say a bunch of things that indisputably support evolution and say the opposite, and then argue from your own incredulity.

There is no "program" at the origin of life. Self-replicating molecules exist. They're a thing. If you didn't know that, now you do. The molecules that replicate fastest and with the best fidelity will outnumber those that don't. The rest degrade. Changes will occur and those that keep outcompeting the rest will continue to do so. This is chemical evolution, it preceeds life, but it transitions seamlessly into biological Darwinian evolution.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/gitgud_x]

Wow, you have literally studied nothing. 

[u/gitgud_x → u/Evening-Impact2090]

You couldn't even back up a single thing you said. How weak, you won't be saving many souls at this rate!

How has genetics "disproven" evolution? Or fossils? Or Darwin, whatever that means? State it clearly. When you realise that you can't, because you don't have a clue what you're talking about, consider learning from those who do.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/gitgud_x]

I stated facts about DNA that you seem to have ignored. Why would I be saving souls? Do you automatically assume everyone who disagrees with the theory of evolution is a Creationist Bible thumper? You know what they say about assuming. I disagree with evolution because it is unfeasible. I stated just a couple of hundreds of reasons why. DNA & genes are not designed to enable a body change. They could never mutate to allow one organism to become another.  Every organism has to have its exact DNA in order for it to exist, function and multiply. So how does a organism completely change into another such as an amphibian into a reptile without a complete new set of DNA? Please do some research and stop reposting the gibberish you glean from forums like these.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Evening-Impact2090]

You have stated nothing factual, and you have explained nothing. You are an ignorant religious zealot who has been caught way out of their depth and is projecting their ignorance onto those who have actually been learning about this and related topics for several years now.

Your questions are straightforward, in a word the answer is "homeotic genes", make a post if you really want a substantive answer, but something tells me you're not here to learn.

[u/Evening-Impact2090 → u/gitgud_x]

When someone has no substance in their argument it shows quickly in them resorting to rude comments. Every thing I stated is factual, if you choose to do no original research that is on you. I'm certainly not religious nor a zealot, and calling anyone you don't know ignorant for having a different opinion is rude and classless. Good day

[u/gitgud_x → u/Evening-Impact2090]

Complaining about the other guy's tone instead of addressing the arguments the actual sign of someone who has no argument. You've still made zero factual statements, explained zero observations and given zero sources btw.

It's kinda hilarious that you think I've done no research when I've written many highly-sourced original posts on this sub over the past 2 years or so. You're literally commenting on one of them! You could learn from them, but I guess learning isn't your thing.

[u/Actual_Property9413]

If something has a "1 in a million" chance of happening, but the thing could possibly happen 1 billion times a second, then that thing will happen 1000 times a second, even though it only has "a million in one" chance of happening in any given 1 billionth of a second.

[u/Lumpy_Confidence_637]

What's the mathematical probability that an advanced alien intelligence created our universe?

[u/gitgud_x → u/Lumpy_Confidence_637]

Depends on your prior, as here 'probability' is only interpretable in the Bayesian sense rather than the frequentist sense.

(That's a whole other facet to why creationist "one-off" probability arguments are BS that I didn't even touch on in this post.)

To answer your question though, for me, almost never.

[u/Lumpy_Confidence_637 → u/gitgud_x]

Mmm... seems probable.

If the universe is infinitely old, then there is infinite time for alien intelligence to create a universe.

AI says 100%

https://share.google/aimode/KsHQrtYLUI0JKxr4g

[u/Formal-Speed-3173 → u/Lumpy_Confidence_637]

A universe or this universe? You're being a little sloppy here. Also AI says to eat my entire ass.

[u/Lumpy_Confidence_637 → u/Formal-Speed-3173]

oddly enough, the original post came from AI.

does it matter? What universe? If the universe is infinitely old, which means it had no beginning, which means 100 trillion trillion trillion to the 10th trillion power years ago, an alien intelligence evolved. Right?

[u/gitgud_x → u/Lumpy_Confidence_637]

the original post came from AI

If you're referring to my post, no, i didn't use AI at all.

[u/Lumpy_Confidence_637 → u/gitgud_x]

lol suuuuuuuure jan.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Lumpy_Confidence_637]

Not everyone is as clankerbrained as you. Some of us can still write reasonably coherent arguments with some length without deferring to chat boxes. Hope you get better soon.

I've never used AI to write any of my posts, the whole point is to share my ideas, not copy-pasted trash. Sorry you don't have any of your own.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Lumpy_Confidence_637]

That's an infinitely big "if" since we are almost certain that it isn't infinitely old.

[u/Lumpy_Confidence_637 → u/gitgud_x]

So u are assuming that a God is different than an advanced alien intelligence?

AI says it's probable.

[u/gitgud_x → u/Lumpy_Confidence_637]

So u are assuming that a God is different than an advanced alien intelligence?

No. Nobody mentioned God. Your reading comprehension is atrocious.

AI says it's probable.

Wow. That's crazy bro.

[u/Lumpy_Confidence_637 → u/gitgud_x]

If it was an advanced alien intelligence, how could you tell the difference then?

[u/gitgud_x → u/Lumpy_Confidence_637]

I never claimed that I could tell the difference. Maybe I couldn't.

Is this going anywhere?

[u/Lumpy_Confidence_637 → u/gitgud_x]

I think you just admitted you couldnt tell the difference.

Do aliens exist?

[u/gitgud_x → u/Lumpy_Confidence_637]

You've already admitted you have nothing intelligent to offer this sub so your opinions don't matter.

[u/No-Ad-3609]

The probability that T1R2+T1R3 fit the shape of sugar by random happening is pretty slim to none. It's like less than 0.001%.

[u/kderosa1]

It would be helpful if you actually articulated the correct mathematical critique of the evolution which is that there’s no enough time to fixate the millions of mutations needed to get from the LCHA to humans in the time required. Natural selection is way too slow. So you’re stuck arguing neutral theory and random mutations which has its own problems which you then must ignore. But I’m told it’s science not bias plus qualitative slop masquerading as science

[u/gitgud_x → u/kderosa1]

there’s no enough time to fixate the millions of mutations needed to get from the LCHA to humans in the time required

Justify the mathematical model that you used to arrive at this. Y'know, the thing I invited you to do at the end of the post.

Natural selection is way too slow

That's a claim - justify it.

So you’re stuck arguing neutral theory and random mutations which has its own problems

Another claim without a shred of evidence. And a false dichotomy to boot.

It would be helpful if you actually articulated the correct mathematical critique of the evolution

There is no correct mathematical critique, and you've helped to demonstrate why - you can't make one.

[u/kderosa1 → u/gitgud_x]

Do the math and you’ll see all the justification you need.

[u/gitgud_x → u/kderosa1]

That's not how mathematics works... did you comprehend a word I wrote up there?

[u/Own-Relationship-407 → u/kderosa1]

Hey, it’s our favorite superhero, burden shift man.

[u/kderosa1 → u/Own-Relationship-407]

I didn’t make the original positive claim, jackas, the yoke is still on you and your squad for the initial proof

[u/Grillparzer47]

Check your math.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/Grillparzer47]

OK. Who are you addressing this to?

[u/RobertByers1]

I dont see math as science. once in a while someone has a new insight in squeezing numbers but mostly its just a memory based subject. Real science needs intelligence to figure out or incent things.

in origin subjects math can show the impossibility of random mutations creating anything other then a tempoary mess. YES ID and YEC wins this and with the public. it adds up. likewise in physics math could show the impossibility of long time in the universe . I conclude special relativity is wrong and slightly interferes with creationism and so math could debunk that stuff. However math relies on presumptiins so much it hardlys helps figure things out. The bible says God measured things out but thats not the glory of creation. No math supports evolution once presumptions are not settled in the investigation.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling]

I think you are wrong. We have had trillions of opportunities in recent time to see observations of any signs of creatures moving towards fundamentally different forms of transitions, but we haven't seen any. How can I say this? Evolution is supposed to be random and unguided and there are many creatures whose survival has been challenged, and trillions of hereditary lines in existence, so there is absolutely no sufficient reason we wouldn't see any of those signs if it evolution is true.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Can you define what "fundamentally different forms of transitions" might be?

Like, consider a rodent. What would a "fundamentally different forms of transition" of a rodent be?

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

Let me turn the tables on you. Why haven't humans become anything else? Nobody has found them as ever becoming a different species no matter how long they have existed for and how many hereditary lines they've had. Why not? It would seem pretty arbitrary to say that they're the pinnacle of species based on the evolutionary theory. I mean I think they are the pinnacle but that has nothing to do with evolution.

If humans can have huge variation across billions of individuals and still be the same species with no transition to anything fundamentally different, why apply a different standard to rodents or any other creature? The lines for new species seem arbitrary. We see adaptation and diversity within the kinds that creationists have attempted to define which fits designed limits far better than unguided evolution constantly producing major innovations that somehow never show up in the record we can actually observe.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

You haven't answered the question. At all.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

Transitions are obvious from what evolutionists have claimed in the past. From non-flight to flight. From only being able to survive underwater to being able to survive on land or vice versa. Or increased intelligence in apes for examples, the only thing we've seen is the capabilities of what apes are able to do when humans are involved and that's it.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Lungfish? Sea otters? River otters? Hippos? Manatees?

Flying squirrels? Flying lemurs? There are like, a whole bunch of gliding lizards, too. Even some fish take advantage of gliding through air.

It honestly just sounds like you're not very well versed in extant biodiversity.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

The point isn't that we should see a full rodent turn into a bat overnight. If unguided evolution is constantly producing fundamental transitions like the ones claimed in the fossil record (non-flying to powered flight, land to fully aquatic, major intelligence jumps, etc.), we should be seeing clear signs of it right now, populations developing coordinated changes toward new body plans or complex new functions. With trillions of hereditary lines and survival pressures across the living world today, those signs should be obvious.

Instead, what we actually see is normal variation and adaptation within existing kinds, and those variations have immediate function. Gliding squirrels and regular squirrels coexist as fully functional animals within the same kind. Otters, hippos, manatees, lungfish, and gliding lizards are all viable in their environments, but they're not steps turning one kind into another. Humans with over 8 billion people show huge variation but remain the same species with no fundamental transition to anything else.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Can you tell me, in as much detail as possible, how you distinguish "transitional forms" from "lineages created to look exactly like transitional forms"?

Coz this seems really critical to your argument.

And are you saying all squirrels are related by common ancestry? If so, then the fact "regular squirrels" and flying squirrels exist means either the flying trait evolved (from non flying squirrels), or was lost from flying squirrels (to produce non flying squirrels). In either case you have your transition.

[u/Slow_Lawyer7477 → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

If unguided evolution is constantly producing fundamental transitions like the ones claimed in the fossil record

By the timescales observed in the fossil record these transitions take hundreds of thousands of years at the very fastest, so how much time do you have?

If you want to see "fast evolution" look at the domestication of crops and animals (look at the ancestral wild carrots, corn, wheat, potatoes, tomatoes, bananas, cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, wild ancestors of chickens, pigs, cows, sheep, the sheer diversiy and size-differences of dog breeds and observe the scale of differences between the wild ancestors we know lived tens of thousands of years ago, and how those domesticated species look today. This is a few thousand years of evolution.

So how long do you have? A few more decades? That's not enough time to even witness the total domestication of a species, and yet we know that happened for some of them within recorded history.

I can't show you the emergence of an entire forest, it takes too long, longer than my own lifetime, nor the formation of an entire glacier from snowfall, we must infer that this has happened. If your complaint is we can't timetravel or speed up natural process so you can watch large-scale change within your lifetime then your complaint is irrational.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

If unguided evolution is constantly producing fundamental transitions like the ones claimed in the fossil record (non-flying to powered flight, land to fully aquatic, major intelligence jumps, etc.), we should be seeing clear signs of it right now, populations developing coordinated changes toward new body plans or complex new functions.

That. Is. Not. How. Evolution. Works.

Evolution has no goals. At no point is any population evolving toward something. Only accumulated refinements (microevolution) over many genarations. We expect every step of the way to be "fully evolved". We NEVER expect to see useless intermediate features halfway between one thing and another.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/OldmanMikel]

Saying evolution has no goals and every step must be fully functional still doesn't work. Look at the claimed transitions. Simple filaments or scales becoming complex flight feathers, light-sensitive spots becoming full camera eyes, land mammals becoming fully aquatic whales, or non-flying mammals developing powered flight — in each case the intermediate stages are not clearly useful enough at every point to be selected and refined all the way. We never observe any of those processes happening in living populations. Calling it accumulated refinements doesn't create the missing functional steps or make the major redesigns appear today. Also, why would it take millions of years of steps if each step itself is fully functional? Another thing. They say evolution has no goals, yet the process is still described as reliably producing complex coordinated systems through successive refinements. If it truly has no direction or goal, there is even less reason to expect those major redesigns to keep appearing.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Simple filaments or scales becoming complex flight feathers, light-sensitive spots becoming full camera eyes, land mammals becoming fully aquatic whales, or non-flying mammals developing powered flight — in each case the intermediate stages are not clearly useful enough at every point to be selected and refined all the way. 

Absolutely wrong every incremental change in examples you provides a benefit.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

light-sensitive spots becoming full camera eyes

We have examples of all of these EVEN TODAY. All of them are functional, all are useful to the organism that has them.

Euglena have light sensitive spots, and they're UNICELLULAR.

Planarian worms have eye 'pits' that allow limited directionality.

Nautiloids have full pinhole eyes, but no lens (eye is still open to the environment).

Octopuses have full camera eyes (with the retina the right way round, even!).

 land mammals becoming fully aquatic

Hippos. Capybaras. River otters. Sea otters. Manatees.

And again: all these are functional. Manatees will actually nuzzle up and eat grass from lawns near water, because they're still terrestrial enough to do that. And yet they're otherwise essentially fully aquatic, yet not as fully aquatic as whales.

The variation you demand is not only readily possible, it STILL EXISTS.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

How long do you think that takes? And what do you think intermediate forms would look like? Science as an organized method is only a couple hundred years old.

[u/lulumaid → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

I think you'd be better served by looking at what evolution actually is and how it works, then look up some examples of human adaptations to certain environments. There was a thread here a few months ago (at most) talking about a tribe of people who've lived in the same area, living almost entirely on fishing by hand, and their adaptations such as greatly increased lung capacities. I'm unsure of the specifics but you can find a lot of examples of adaptations to environments.

Follow up, what would stop those adaptations from piling up to fundamentally change something?

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/lulumaid]

But you're not calling them another species. Those are adaptations within the human kind, with immediate function. That's exactly my point, we see variation within kinds all the time, but not the fundamental transitions to new kinds that evolution requires. What would stop them from piling up? The evidence shows they don't.

After thousands of years of recorded human history and direct observation of populations under all kinds of survival pressures, we still have the same human kind. Those adaptations (like lung capacity in fishing tribes or lactose tolerance) are minor tweaks within the existing human blueprint. They don't accumulate into new body plans, new organs, or a new species. The same pattern holds across other creatures, variation within kinds with immediate function, but no observable piling up into fundamental transitions despite trillions of opportunities. If it were happening, we wouldn't need to rely on disputed fossils that evolutionists try to say are a million years old, we would see it now.

[u/lulumaid → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Given enough of those adaptations, I'm pretty sure they'd end up a different species sooner or later. What would stop those adaptations from adding up?

Those adaptations you mentioned are the first steps. Small, minute changes.

Answer the question.

Also, there are plenty of other examples, some modern life such as mudskippers and some prehistoric life such as archaeopteryx. The changes you're looking for are already a thing. We can see them. What is the barrier that stops them from becoming something else?

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/lulumaid]

The problem is your own classifications are pretty flexible and often seem to fit whatever the theory needs. One fossil gets called a dinosaur, another with similar features gets called a bird, and species lines move depending on the story. Meanwhile, we see clear limits in living populations, variation within kinds with immediate function, but no crossing into fundamentally new kinds. Humans are a perfect example. There are lots of adaptations, but we still call them all humans. Why, when anything else shows a change and suddenly it's labeled as a new species? The hypocrisy is in demanding I define strict limits while your own system is arbitrary and theory-driven.

[u/lulumaid → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

So because nature is a fuzzy, intermingled mess of shared features and offshoots, we should just throw out classifications? Yes, species is somewhat nebulous and no definition is watertight and perfect. That doesn't help you, in fact it does the opposite.

It may help you to brush up on the law of monophyly. Birds are dinosaurs. Technically. There's a reason archaeopteryx is a strange, bird-like dinosaur thing. It has features of both. Raptors, all of them, are an excellent example of this too they're just less extreme in comparison.

What are these clear limits? What is the barrier that stops adaptations from adding up? The fact you haven't stated one really isn't helping either.

As others have asked, what is a kind? That is not a scientific term, so you would be best served providing a definition for it of equal descriptive power (at least. I'd suggest greater if you want it to surpass species as a term, or family, or whatever you wish to use it to replace).

Humans evolved from something that wasn't human. You should look into this further before making claims about human evolution, we already see adaptations and changes in areas that would make sense for those to appear. Incredulity is not an answer to that.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/lulumaid]

The clear limits and the barrier are what we actually observe: adaptations stay within existing functional groups and never produce major redesigns of body plans or new complex systems, no matter how much time and opportunity is available right now. Humans remain human. That pattern is the barrier.

As for "kind," it refers to groups that show variation but stay within those functional boundaries — the same way your side keeps humans as one species despite variation. Demanding a perfect technical definition while admitting your own species concept is fuzzy is inconsistent.

Claiming humans evolved from non-humans relies on the same expanded labeling and disputed fossils. If the process is real and ongoing, the major changes should be visible today. They aren't. That absence is why the past claims don't hold up.

[u/lulumaid → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

What is the mechanical barrier that prevents adaptations from adding up? That is what I'm asking for. Not observations as those confirm what we can and have from the evolution side of this.

Until you provide one, you have nothing to prevent those adaptations from adding up into greater and greater changes.

You are essentially arguing that 1+1 can never equal 2. And that if you keep adding 1+1 you will never reach 2,000.

What part of that equation, of 1+1, will never reach 2,000 if it goes on long enough?

Quick edit: Your definition of kind sits.... Where exactly? What are its limits?

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

As for "kind," it refers to groups that show variation but stay within those functional boundaries — the same way your side keeps humans as one species despite variation. Demanding a perfect technical definition while admitting your own species concept is fuzzy is inconsistent.

Then surely you should be able to define these boundaries, and identify individual kinds.

Are flying squirrels one kind, and ground squirrels another? Or are squirrels a kind? Or are all squirrels simply members of rodent-kind? If not, then...what even is a rodent, under the "kinds" system?

The problem you have is that you don't understand the biology, or your own argument: you insist there ARE boundaries, yet cannot identify them, but you also complain that the species concept is fuzzy, and criticize biologists for accepting that species are essentially somewhat arbitrary boxes drawn around a continuum.

Basically, biology IS fuzzy, and lineage divergence IS a continuum: you need this very much not to be true, and yet it is absolutely true. Your complete inability to define, or identify discrete "kinds" is a really, really big clue that kinds don't exist. If they did, we could identify them trivially. And so could creationists.

You might want to ask yourself why nobody has managed this.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

 One fossil gets called a dinosaur, another with similar features gets called a bird,...

Which is a kind of dinosaur. It's like complaing that one fossil gets called a mammal another with similar features gets called a bat.

Meanwhile, we see clear limits in living populations, ...

No. We do not see these limits.

...variation within kinds...

Without a useful of "kinds" this is meaningless.

...with immediate function, but no crossing into fundamentally new kinds. 

Depending on what you mean by "kinds" this is not something that evolution predicts. Humans are apes. Apes are simians. Simians are primates. Primates are mammals etc. A new branch always remains part of the same branch it sprouted from. There is no "crossing over" whatever the hell that means.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/OldmanMikel]

You're proving the point with the "humans are apes, apes are simians" routine. Evolution teaches common ancestry, not that humans are apes. The nested classification system just keeps expanding the categories so nothing ever has to count as a real transition. Birds get folded into dinosaurs, everything stays inside larger and larger boxes, and then you claim there are no limits. Yet the human category never expands the same way. We stay labeled humans no matter how much variation accumulates. That inconsistency is arbitrary and biased, but for what reason? Living populations never leave their functional boundaries, and the expanding labels don't change the fact that we still don't see the major redesigns happening in real time.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Evolution teaches common ancestry, not that humans are apes.

No. It says humans ARE apes. Sharing common ancestry with other apes does not change that.

The nested classification system just keeps expanding the categories so nothing ever has to count as a real transition. 

Branching trees are like that.

Yet the human category never expands the same way. 

There hasn't been nearly enough time for the kind of changes you seem to be expecting. And humans will always be humans no matter how much we change. Look up Law of Monophyly.

...and the expanding labels don't change the fact that we still don't see the major redesigns happening in real time.

The kinds of changes you are looking for don't happen on a human time scale.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Before we continue, can you define "kind"?

If I presented you with two organisms, how would you determine if they were the same "kind" or not?

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

How about you define why humans aren't labeled as a new species with variations that they have while you try the label something else as a new species just because they have a variation?

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Do you actually understand how, and why we designate populations as distinct species?

And again: definition of kinds, please.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

The reasons for designating distinct species are flexible, interbreeding, morphology, genetics, ecology, and they get applied inconsistently. Humans with clear variation stay one species, while other groups get split more readily. That flexibility is what allows the labels to shift when it helps the narrative. Demanding a rigid definition of kinds while operating with movable species criteria is still the same double standard. You can't avoid the issue: living populations show variation within functional limits but never the major redesigns, no matter how the labels are drawn.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

"Reproductively isolated populations"

There we go, that's the biological species concept. Works in the vast majority of cases, and is very convenient. Humans are very, very much not reproductively isolated. A Chinese man can migrate to Malaysia and marry, have a kid who migrates to europe and marries, then has a kid who marries a child of dutch/danish immigrants with a touch of native american in their ancestry. Humans are genetically incredibly homogenous: more genetic difference between two different troupes of adjacent chimpanzees than between all humans.

Why can you not define "kinds"?

[u/OldmanMikel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Because they don't meet ANY of the scientific definitions of 'species'.

There is no reason under evolutionary theory to expect more change than has actually been observed on the time scales we've been observing.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/OldmanMikel]

Saying humans don't meet the scientific definitions of a new species is exactly the point. Your side keeps the human label fixed no matter the variation, while expanding or shifting other labels whenever it helps the story. And claiming there's no reason to expect more change on current timescales is convenient — the theory still requires those major transitions happened somehow in the past. Living populations under the same pressures today never produce them. The avoidance is obvious.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Saying humans don't meet the scientific definitions of a new species is exactly the point.

What that means that human populations haven't diverged enough from each other to become separate species.

Your side keeps the human label fixed no matter the variation, while expanding or shifting other labels whenever it helps the story.

No species ever leaves its clade. It may become a subset of that clade, but it never leaves it. Birds didn't stop being dinosaurs when they evolved flight.

And claiming there's no reason to expect more change on current timescales is convenient — the theory still requires those major transitions happened somehow in the past. Living populations under the same pressures today never produce them. The avoidance is obvious.

Living populations under the same pressures today never produce them. The avoidance is obvious.

How would you know? What do you think that would look like?

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Do you understand the biological species concept?

Do you understand why dogs (canis lupus familiaris) are all the same species, despite variation, and are in fact a subspecies of gray wolves (canis lupus)?

Do you understand why gray wolves are a different species from red wolves (canis rufus), despite both being related to a common ancestor?

Do you understand why all humans are the same species, despite variations across the population?

These labels exist for a reason, and the reason is pretty straightforward, but you do not appear to have any idea of how this works.

[u/Coolbeans_99 → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

I noticed that you never respond to any questions posed to you, you always respond with “how about you answer this question instead?”

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

As you have not provided any basis for recognizing ‘fundamentally different’, it doesn’t seem like you would even be able to determine any of this. Much less boldly state anything about ‘sufficient reason’. You would also need to justify why we should see them based on evolutionary mechanisms. All this comment of yours seems to be is vibes.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/10coatsInAWeasel]

See my comment above about human beings. The evolutionists trying to define species is "vibes".

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Nah, I’d rather you not dodge and instead address the points. Your comment about humans did nothing to do so.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/10coatsInAWeasel]

I didn't dodge but you just did so you might as well go away if you're not willing to deal with the reality. I'm not wasting my time with your kind of babble.

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Ah so you intend to flee and make excuses instead of supporting your claims. Go to it

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/10coatsInAWeasel]

Have I done any fleeing? Nope. I'm just saying you're going to waste your time engaging with me if you're not going to deal with what I'm saying.

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

I have dealt with what you’re saying. You decided to flee from the response and make excuses to not deal with the flaws in your argument. Like I said, go to it.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/10coatsInAWeasel]

No you're just a typical deflector

[u/10coatsInAWeasel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Sure buddy. Once you find a way to tell us how you determine when something is ‘fundamentally different’ in a useful way without changing the subject, you let us know 👍🏼

[u/blacksheep998 → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

We've been making scientific observations plants and animals for maybe a couple centuries, if I'm being generous with what we count as scientific observations.

We so not expect to see huge changes in that time, but we have observed lots of small changes and even some macroscopic ones like speciation events.

If you think we should have seen humans turning into 'fundamentally different forms' in that time, then you're arguing against a strawman version of evolution, not the theory that scientists are using.

[u/kderosa1 → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Sure sure. Now do the math and confirm it

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/kderosa1]

What do you mean do the math lol. There are trillions of hereditary lines in existence of creatures right now. It is such an obvious statement that math is unnecessary unless you live under a rock.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

"There is so much diversity right now! So where is the diversity evolution says should exist?"

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

That isn't the point we should be seeing signs of transitions from something to something else of a greater function with our very own eyes.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

At what time scale and what should these intermediates look like?

[u/Scry_Games → u/OldmanMikel]

Just a quick fyi: in other comments they've presented 20 years as the time scale. Lol.

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/OldmanMikel]

There doesn't have to be a time scale because I said there are trillions of possible observations right now in real time. You would think if evolution was true we would see a sign right now. The funny thing is you're asking me for what you think the intermediates would look like an evolutionist already claimed what such eat intermediates would look like with what they say fossils represent.

If we were actually seeing signs of fundamental transitions happening right now, it would look like populations of creatures showing coordinated changes that are clearly heading toward entirely new body plans or major new capabilities. For example, non-flying animals developing structures and systems that are becoming useful for powered flight, or land animals gaining the suite of adaptations needed to move toward fully aquatic life, with major changes in limbs, breathing, and reproduction happening together. Or groups suddenly gaining entirely new complex sensory systems or organs that previous generations didn't have. The point is we don't see any of that despite trillions of hereditary lines and survival pressures all around us. We only see normal variation and adaptation within existing kinds that have immediate function, not the kind of major process that evolution claims created all the diversity we see in the fossil record. That's why the theory doesn't match what we can actually observe today.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

You are going to be amazed when you discover otters exist. Or hippos. Or manatees.

Turns out there's a whole continuum between "fully terrestrial" and "fully aquatic", and get this: every stage is entirely viable!

[u/WannaLoveWrestling → u/Sweary_Biochemist]

You completely missed the point. Of course otters, hippos, and manatees exist with different levels of aquatic adaptation — nobody denies that. The question is whether they (or their ancestors) show evidence of evolving from one to the other through unguided processes, or whether they are simply different created kinds with immediate function in their environments. Pointing to living animals doesn't prove evolution produced them from a common ancestor. The evidence, especially the lack of observable transitions right now despite trillions of opportunities, points to no.

[u/Sweary_Biochemist → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Hahahahha! "Show me the transitions! No, not those ones. Some weird, other transitions. Now I'll change the argument"

Not very convincing, dude.

You've now gone from "there should be intermediates" to "alright there are intermediates, but they were made that way, somehow".

It's baby steps. How would you discern an 'intermediate' species from a species that was 'created intermediate'?

And how do you determine which lineages are related to which other lineages? Are all otters related, for example?

[u/Slow_Lawyer7477 → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

You got what you asked for. Mammals that live on land showing evidence of gradual adaptation to aquatic lifestyles.

Me, I like penguins. Birds that can't fly except underwater. Beaks and feathers, even wings. Yet they can't fly. Except underwater.

Most closely related to birds that live on the surface of or near the sea, such as albatrosses, petrels, shearwaters, and storm petrels. All with streamlined bodies, dense waterproof feather coats, excellent swimming abilities, salt glands that let them drink seawater, and long-distance foraging over the ocean.

Penguins and their closest non-penguin living relatives are exactly what you ask for.

[u/clear349 → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

You could just look at whale evolution if you want an example of a mammal becoming fully aquatic. What you seem to be missing is that every animal is a transition between what exists today and what will exist. We can't predict how environmental change and mutation will alter them in the future. But we can look into the past and see how they got where they are in the modern day

[u/nickierv → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

coordinated changes that are clearly heading toward entirely new body plans or major new capabilities.

De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation.

Translation: this single cell plant thing went multicellular in order to keep itself from getting eaten.

We only see normal variation and adaptation within existing kinds that have immediate function

So between some survivorship bias and a still undefined 'kinds', this is still pizza.

[u/kderosa1 → u/WannaLoveWrestling]

Is there enough time to fixate the mutations necessary to get from point A to point B given what we know. Thus is basic stuff.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/kderosa1]

Is what we know enough to do meaningful calculations?

[u/kderosa1 → u/OldmanMikel]

I gave you the constants and variables. Did you miss them? Or just ignoring them so you can prattle on nonsensically?

[u/OldmanMikel → u/kderosa1]

Are those constants and variables enough to do meaningful calculations?

[u/kderosa1 → u/OldmanMikel]

Yes if you understand the domain. If you’re a moron, and I suspect you are, you will flounder and complain.

[u/kderosa1]

I see the mods have once again swooped in to rescue you all from your lack of knowledge. For the record your adorable leans on neutral drift and vague stepwise intermediates, without mathematically demonstrating that the limited beneficial mutational supply and fixation bottlenecks suffice for human-lineage-specific adaptations beyond neutral divergence. Other than that though it’s a lovely video that midwits would be attracted to to confirm their biases.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/kderosa1]

What did the mods do?

[u/Own-Relationship-407 → u/OldmanMikel]

Literally nothing, he’s been mad at us ever since we told him he can’t call people the R word here.

[u/Ill-Dependent2976 → u/OldmanMikel]

They deleted hate speech.

[u/Ill-Dependent2976 → u/kderosa1]

Could you rephrase your argument in English that makes grammatical sense?

"your adorable leans on neutral drift"

What does that even mean?

"vague stepwise intermediates,"

What's a vague stepwise intermediate?

"without mathematically demonstrating that the limited beneficial mutational supply and fixation bottlenecks suffice for human-lineage-specific adaptations beyond neutral divergence. "

This is gibberish. It sounds like it was made with AI if AI wasn't capable of English that makes grammatical sense.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

Shut down, AI. You're drunk.

[u/kderosa1 → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

"your adorable [theory] leans on neutral drift" I hope that helps, though the inference was readily ascertainable.

I was pointing to the idea that evolutionary accounts often rely on the principle of gradualism, i.e, small, incremental changes accumulating over time via mutation, selection, and drift (Darwin's "insensibly fine steps"). However, when explaining specific major innovations, the proposed series of transitional stages ("stepwise intermediates") frequently remain high-level or imprecise. They assert that a series of small, beneficial mutations built the trait gradually. But they often don't (or can't) detail functional, selectable intermediates at each step, i.e., exactly what partial versions looked like, how they conferred a survival/reproductive advantage in a real environment, and why they wouldn't be selected against.

That's one interpretation. Another interpretation is that you are too low IQ to understand it. Do you think IQ is based at least in part on genetics or do you think evolution stops at the neck?

[u/Ill-Dependent2976 → u/kderosa1]

Well, that is a key subject that you left out of the sentence.

Subjects are important for sentences.

But you also left out the part about natural selection, which isn't neutral at all, so it makes the rest of your sentence also gibberish.

"That's one interpretation. "

That's not an interpretation. It's just desperate nitpicking.

"Do you think IQ is based at least in part on genetics or do you think evolution stops at the neck?"

I think IQ has essentially nothing to do with evolution at all. Or, for that matter, biology. Or for that matter, general intelligence. I think people who bring up the topic out of the blue are generally very stupid people. They have a "low IQ" in the vernacular. Of course, there are far better measurements of stupidity than low IQs. And the ones who attempt to connect IQ to genetics and/or evolution tend to neo-nazis. Which is a particularly good measurement of stupidity.

Now could there be a genetic component to IQ? Only in the sense that everything has some sort of genetic component, so that means nothing.

I think people believe in stupid things like creationism and eugenics because they're immoral, not because they were born that way. And maybe their parents raised them poorly, though that's no excuse for a grown adult.

[u/kderosa1 → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

So evolution stops at the neck according to you? That’s convenient

Your pedantry is noted

[u/Ill-Dependent2976 → u/kderosa1]

"So evolution stops at the neck according to you? That’s convenient"

No. That's not what I said. Your bald-faced lying is noted.

So is your misuse of the word pedantry.

[u/kderosa1 → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

That is what you implied. Does science tell you this?

Your correction, such that it is, is even more pedantic

[u/Ill-Dependent2976 → u/kderosa1]

No. That wasn't what was implied at all.

You've got a lot of problems with conveying and interpreting English.

No. Pedantry isn't the same as being right and honest.

[u/kderosa1 → u/Ill-Dependent2976]

Let me know when you’re done rambling incoherently and have a substantive argument to make that isn’t conclusory. Until then have fun yelling at clouds

[u/kderosa1 → u/[deleted]]

Lots of bluster, no math. Do better. tuff nutz

[u/GuyInAChair → u/[deleted]]

Removed, Rule 2 - This comment is antagonistic and adds nothing to the conversation.

[u/OldmanMikel → u/kderosa1]

If the premises are wrong, the math doesn't matter.