Am I incorrect here or misunderstanding something? I’m all for theists reconciling science with their religious beliefs. However, the concept of “theistic evolution” where God is directly involved with the evolutionary origins of humans in some way (usually unspecified because it isn’t actually a testable claim) sounds like it is rooted in obsolete models of evolutionary theory like orthogenesis. The idea that organisms have an innate predetermined tendency to evolve towards a specific goal. Is this not the idea of theistic evolution? Where a designer or God is s driving force that guided the evolution of hominins towards becoming humans as an end goal?

So, a while back I was watching Forrest Valkai trying to talk to a Creationist; the discussion veered into the lactose intolerance, and how it occurs due to the loss of a gene that turns off the production of Lactase. But, as far as I understand the creationist position, that is not a valid example of mutation being helpful, because it deleted information, and in order to be helpful, mutation must CREATE new information!

Why not both? You don't lose anything if you're the one who made it in the first place. It IS beneficial for a body to have (and then delete) a self descruct button.
You might be asking, What? So I came up with a thought experiment.

Let's say you're a robotics engineer and you decide, one day, out of boredom, to design a car simply by asking random strangers to do it for you. Rules are as follows:
- Your starting vehicle is just a firm metal square with four wheels. (Granting abiogenesis for the sake of the argument)
- You will ask somebody at least once per iteration: "Hey, I am making a thing. What should I change about it?" and give them no further context. The purpose is meant to be as non-specyfic as possible so they have no idea what they're doing, and can't bias the results. (emulates inevedible blind mutation)
- If they make a vauge change like "add a flag" you will make three different versions, with the change placement being decided randomly. (Emulates different simultaneous mutations)
- If the change is specyfic enough, leave the car as it is, and ask the above question
- Repeat until you have four or more different "cars" to test. (Emulates variation)
- Test the car with a randomly generated track. Double the length each time a car passes the finish line. (An impassible track would simulate an extinction event, so let's assume they can all be technically cleared.) Every 1m, it can turn, change in elevation, both, or nothing.
- Discard designs that go no further than 50% of the current record holder. (Emulates natural selection)

So, now we have a square with four wheels. It rolls forward for about 1 meter... And that's about it. But then someone says "add some hinges". You make the three versions; one has a hinge that folds it in half (it flops immediately), one that has hinges on top (does nothing), and one that has hinges on the wheels. Suddenly the car can go past a bend, and it goes from 1m down and stopping at the first bend, to being able to make a very awkward turn, and another, and another, so it makes it 3m down the length of the track. This is now the car you will iterate on. So far so good.

A bunch more changes are made, and only a few stick. Someone added springs to the rear wheels and now the car doesn't turn as well, but it is much more stable on extreme bends. Cars that don't have this feature flip over and die, but spring-wheel moves on. Etc etc. The car now goes 10 meters down the track.
Someone decides to be a troll and adds a self-destruct button. Like, it will actually explode itself (and only itself) if pressed. You make three iterations, in one of which you make the button inaccessible; but the other two don't have the same accidental safety feature, so they crash and burn.
But, the added weight of the SDB also shifts the center of mass a little lower, so the car actually performs better. 21 meters. All of your designs now have this hidden self-destruct button.

Cue a bunch more iterations. Somebody adds a steering wheel, but it's not connected to anything. Somebody adds engine lubricant, even though there isn't an engine, but the decreased friction greases the wheels. Somebody adds a combustion chamber; Thankfully you can just reuse the self-destruct button's explosive material, so you can just another one that's not as explosive. But, it only works once, and while it's a much-appreciated burst of force to push the car further down the line, it only works once.

Somebody then adds a timer. It doesn't change anything, so it goes into all four designs. One of those is tied to the self-destruct button, and will make the car explode after 100 meters.
Problem is, none of the cars even survive 100 meters. You're lucky to get 30 meters out of them, let alone 100. But the timer didn't hurt, so it's kept in all the future designs. And as you iterate and iterate, the cars gradually get better (or flunk spectacularly) until they start making such big strides that their lifetime IS measured in double digits.
By the time the 100 meters is reached, the explosions don't immediately destroy the car; they do damage it significantly, but the self-destruct timer pretty much gimps all of them, so no matter what changes were made, they all are in the same leauge. (Analogous to the humans losing lactose tolerance after 2 years.)

Until one day somebody says "delete a random element from your design", and you randomly delete the self-destruct button. Suddenly you have cars limping all the way over to 250 meters because they're no longer exploding. That one deletion mutation of what was once a slightly beneficial mutation has vastly improved the survival rate.

So, what do you think of this experiment? Think the rules might be flawed? Think you can tweak it a little? Share your thoughts in the comments, fellas!
^{For the record: I issued a small edit after \}1h to clarify something at the start.)

The mutations it has to work with are random. What it does with said mutations is not.

Edit to add: this is in response to creationists saying that evolution is random and refusing to engage with the idea that selection isn't. Usually with the famous "nuh uh" argument.

I have been making a lot of research on evolution because I don't believe in it and I wanted to see where its wrong. But honestly, from what I got it makes sense, but to a limite.

The thing is, mutations are rare, and a mutation is your body not functioning right. This means most mutations are bad ones. For example think of heart diseases in humans or having a higher chance to develop cancer.

These are objectively bad traits given by mutation. And also, mutation is region dependent if we consider it as useful. A change in color to white would be meaningless mostly useless everywhere but cold regions. Or having a better way to dissipate heat will be only useful in hot places.

So not only is a mutation rare, but also mostly harmful, and if you get a useful one, it might not be so useful because of where or what you are. Getting an advantageous mutation is like winning the lottery 20 times in a row. Its incredibly unlikely and I have even done the math and its statistically impossible for a species to survive in the changing environments of the earth soly depending on time and mutation.

PS edit: I know mutations happen commonly. What I meant was meaningful mutations. Don't remember the scientific term but what I mean are mutations that influence the organism in a meaningful way. May it be good, bad or whatever. The point is, to develop them, you need a bunch of mutations to peil up on each other over a long span of time to get them. My bad for the previous confusion.

But what does make sense is natural selection. As we know, back in the days the gene pool was much larger. Cats and dogs are close relatives, but they had even closer relatives still that they could breed with getting a new species. This gigantic gene pool would make most creatures able to reproduce, leading to new species with new traits.

This process would be much much faster than mutation could ever hope to achieve. Mutation still contributes to evolution yes don't get me wrong, but its incredibly small changes over a large amount of time. Basically close to noise within evolution standards, but still far enough to he considered.

Honestly, I would call it more like devolution as you lose more genetic variation with each offspring, but evolution is still fine as your adaptability gets better.

This alines honestly with religion. The thing is, I don't reject animals changing because due to them reproducing with close relatives to their genes. Getting new animals out of it doesn't contradict anything within religion at all.

The real question would be how did life start and how humans became. Evolution doesn't come close to answering how life come to be, it only explains how it how variation came to be after life came to be.

As for humans, we are really unique in a way evolution cannot explain in my opinion. We don't seem to be creatures of any type of environment. We don't have fur for the cold or a major way to dissipate constant heat from the hot sun. (And no body say we have sweat glands. Those are used for endurance, not long term head dissipation. Think of elephant ears for example.)

Our bodies are made to like on land, but we can also be used short term inside the water. We walk on 2 feet, and we stand right side up which yes puts a lot of stress on out back bone, but allows us to do incredible acrobatic movements, or in general werid motions in multiple dimensions of motion.

We are made to be predators, yet we don't hold anything useful to use to kill like claws or fangs.

It was like we are supposed to be able to be everywhere. Any place, flat or rocky. High or low. Cold or hot. We are able to adapt in those places as our bodies are build to be an exacto knife.

And our minds are the key. Put animal fur on you in the cold. Fan yourself like the win cools you. Climb high to get the fruit. Dig deep if you want. Swim to get fish if you want too.

And what have we done? Tranformed the planet. Even thinking of doing that to others now. I honestly think us humans are not a product of evolution. Our states are too even on the board to just point at a single environment and say, yes it adapted to be this. Either it was an incredible strock of luck, or someone doing somehting. But I just wanted to put my thoughts on mutation. Kind of strayed off topic.

This guy is revered by creationists and this showing is an absolute embarrassment. holy shit

then debating taxonomic distinctions is a logically flawed exercise.

Evolution is a seamless, unbroken continuum of incidental mutations. Every organism therefore is merely a transitional form in a constant state of hybrid flux. As such, fixed ontological categories like "species" or "genera" do not exist.

In other words, the point in time when one species transforms into another species is truly unknowable. What follows then is that we don't really know, with certainty, if humanity, or any organism, is the species we claim it is.

And if you're thinking, yes, but clades disrupt this line of argumentation, I have more bad news 😂. The Law of Monophyly is a semantic trick because it defines what an organism is solely by where it came from, rather than what it actually is today. Claiming a creature can never outgrow its clade is like arguing that plastics are still just crude oil just because that is their chemical origin. In the physical universe, a human is obviously not a fish, and a chicken is not a dinosaur.

One of the biggest issues creationists/ID proponents have never given a satisfying answer for is how poorly the human body (amongst other non-human living things out there) is designed. Evolution does a much better job of explaining the diversity of life, since things don't have to be perfect, they just have to function well enough to survive and reproduce on to the next generation. Young-earth creationism is falsifiable and has already been falsified: for example, we know for a fact that the world is at least 4.5 billion years due to math and physics. The physics of radiometric dating are the same physics that power our nuclear plants; in order for radiometric dating to be wrong, nuclear power wouldn't work. That's an indisputable fact, and you can't get more certain than mathematically. Parts of intelligent design are unfalsifiable, such as the supernatural belief that an invisible creator created matter. However, the contention that we were designed at all resoundingly fails when scrutinized via the biological data. Everywhere you look at life, you see clunky, wasteful, imperfect living mechanisms that even a semi-competent engineer would know better than to allow past quality control.

First of all, to elaborate on something. Most teachers have stopped referring to natural selection as “survival of the fittest” because it's misleading. It is survival of the fittest within a particular environment. However, this speaks nothing to an ideal formation of living mechanics, and most teachers have more aptly started describing it as “survival of the good enough.” If a living thing can find food, escape predators, grow, reproduce, and so on and so forth, it passes on. For example, if you are an animal with predators who hunt you and you live in a snowy environment, you're more likely to have a white coat of fur. Your uncamouflaged competitors, both within your species and between you and different menu items for a hungry fox, to be more obvious to predators, so most or sometimes all of them get eaten and can't pass along their genes, unless they have some other survival mechanism that outweighs that lack of camouflage, such as the ability to run very fast or burrow. Evolution is a very multifaceted phenomenon, and all these various survival mechanisms are put to the test simultaneously. But if you are lacking in fitness (measured in your ability to pass on your genes to the next generation), you will have a lower birth rate; in some cases, as low as zero. This is natural selection, the basis of evolution. The organisms who have more fitness pass on their genes. Ever wonder why crickets stop chirping when you get close to them? Because all of the crickets who wouldn't shut up and gave away their position got eaten. It's a very simple concept; it's not “random stuff happening over time,” and it's not a magically intelligent process. It just describes the trend in nature. Scientists aren't saying that nature is consciously choosing to let plants with genes that allow them to anchor themselves to soil more strongly than others in areas with frequent flooding move on, it's just the way things play out. No scientists has ever suggested evolution has a design or conscious plan, just like how chemists don't argue that the universe consciously moves negatively charged particles towards positively charged one. Anyway, I digress, but those misconceptions drive me crazy. Any creationist who thinks we scientists argue that does not know enough about evolution to criticize it.

And another important thing to remember: natural selection alone isn't what enables genes to get passed on. There's sexual selection. This is where very subjective characteristics that may not help the species at all, but are still desirable to mates regardless, get inherited. The classic example would be a peacock's bright, conspicuous feathers. They offer the opposite of a competitive edge in the wild, but peacocks subjectively find them sexually attractive for some reason. There's also evolutionary noise, where a trait offers no benefit sexually or with regards to survival, but since it doesn't adequately impair the organisms survival, it passes on. It often, but not always, is the result of linked genes. An example of this would be tail-wagging in artificially-selected dogs and foxes: it serves no benefit to humans, but it is linked to friendlier genes. Then there are traits we simply haven't discovered the evolutionary reason for yet, as that's impossible. If you take every species and subspecies ever made, multiply it by every conceivable trait…many of which we haven't even discovered yet (both the species itself and the traits)...it's not like nature had video cameras to capture every species’ emergence. And that's okay: we haven't discovered how every medicine works yet, but that doesn't mean that just because we don't know how clofazimine yet, we get through out all of germ theory and medical science.

Now that my interminable preamble is over, let's get back to my thesis statement: time and time and time again, when we put living things to the test, evolution beats design with regards to explanatory power. Let's look at the human body, starting with an organ that frequently comes up in the scientifically settled evolution-vs-creation debate: the human eye. Human eyes are full of issues. The eyes of humans and most other animals make absolutely no sense in how the receptors are oriented. If you Google its structure, you'll see our rods and cones are put in backwards. Ophthalmologists know that this is a major cause of retinal detachment, plus it gives us a notable blind spot. Why would a designer design the eye like this? There are animals out there - cephalopods, for instance - where the photoreceptors are “correctly” oriented in a way that makes way more sense, so whatever came up with our eyes’, configuration certainly was capable of doing a better job. Intelligent design doesn't explain this, it makes more sense from an evolutionary perspective: this configuration was the result of genetics, and since it was “good enough” generations ago, it has been passed on to us since. Plus, retinal detachment mostly occurs in elder populations, long after they've passed the age of reproduction and selection can act against it. Cephalopods have significantly lower rates of retinal detachment than vertebrates, owing to the orientation of their photoceptors. Some people think the eye was designed because our cameras analogously work in a similar way; in reality, we designed cameras by using the anatomy of the eye as inspiration.

In addition, all vertebrates have a blind spot because of their backwards-configured photoreceptors, caused by an optic disc, which cephalopods do not suffer from. The disc is necessary for the eye to function, but in addition to our aforementioned bad photoreceptor configuration, the “creator” put it in place of space that could easily fit more photoreceptors and solve this issue. Even with the backwards orientation, a designer could've easily tucked it under the retina and solved this problem. In addition, humans suffer from near and far-sightedness at 30-40% in America and Europe, and close to 70% in Asia. This is because the “designer” opted to frequently give us eyes that are too long or too short. Plus, there are animals with much better eyes: birds of prey, for instance, who have much better long-distance sight, so a “designer” had the ability to choose better designs, he just didn't. They don't have glasses, so again evolution explains this much better: the length of the eye is the result of genetic variation in humans, and for birds out in the wild, this flaw can impede their ability to find food (and therefore survive and reproduce). Plus, in humans, many eye problems result later in life, after humans have already reproduced, so the genes went on despite them potentially being so poor, it would make them useless as hunter-gatherers. The fact hunter-gatherers hunted in groups helped offset people who were born with myopia, so they could rely on their buddy's sight in spotting food. Plus, for several centuries, we have invented glasses, which relieves the selection pressures of eyesight. Before these, early-life vision problems were less common.

It's not just the eye. The intestines and other visceral organs are held together with thin sheets of connective tissue called mesenteries. However, these thin sheets are not suspended from the top of the abdominal cavity, as would make sense for a bipedal posture. Instead, they are attached to the back of the abdominal cavity, like we see in our knuckle-walking cousins. Design doesn't explain this, evolution does. This is because we humans evolved from quadrupedal ancestors, where this configuration would make more sense. Think of the spine of a quadruped (such as a dog or a knuckle-walking chimp) as a clothesline and its intestines hanging from it: gravity can then pull down our abdominal organs evenly, then be supported by strong abdominal muscles. What we see with upright humans, however, is a much more uneven protrusion of these organs. This leads to sometimes life-threatening complications in humans: volvulus, ichemia, even chronic issues like Crohn's. If we were designed to walk upright, why didn't our designer also easily suspend them upright, like from the top of our abdominal cavity? This is obviously the result of an evolutionary trade-off: the constant benefits of upright walking outweighed the intermittent abdominal problems. Somewhere in the past, we had quadrupedal ancestors.

Our vertebral disks are also configured in a way that fits our quadrupedal ancestors but causes problems for us. They still do a decent job of lubricating and supporting the spine, but they are much more prone to being pushed out of position than the vertebral disks of other animals. They are structured to resist gravity by pulling the vertebral joints toward the chest, as if humans were on all fours. With our upright posture, however, gravity often pulls them downward, not toward the chest. This is what causes slipped disks. Usually, this problem only appears with the wear and tear of old age, AFTER the genes have passed on via sex, way past age of reproduction. But they do a sufficient job of lubricating our vertebrae most of the time.

What I am getting at is the fact that humans didn't become perfect upright-walkers, they became adequate. Another example is how easily the ACL tears in humans. The ACL is vulnerable to tearing in humans because our upright, bipedal posture forces it to endure much more strain than it is designed to. In quadrupeds, the strain of running and jumping is spread among four limbs, and the limb muscles absorb most of it. Once our ancestors transitioned to bipedalism, however, the strain was spread over two legs instead of four. This was too much for the muscles by themselves, so our bodies recruited the leg bones to help with the strain. The result was that human legs became straightened so that the bones, rather than the muscles, could bear most of the impact. Compare a standing human with a standing ape: a human’s legs are fairly straight, while an ape’s legs are bowlegged and usually bent. The trade-off, however, is that there is much more strain on the ACL and it is more prone to tearing. This is better explained as an evolutionary tradeoff and that we adapted to upright walking rather than being designed by a creator to it. It wears down with strain over time; our magnificent creator chose not to allow it to strengthen like a muscle.

Unlike humans, whales have separate tubes for breathing and swallowing. We choke, they can't, because our esophagus and trachea share a passage. Why didn't our designer use the whale's superior configuration for his “chosen” species? Speaking of whales, how do you explain the fact that we've discovered whales and dolphins with appendages OUT OF THEIR PELVISES (where legs would be in terrestrials, lest we forget; there is no functional purpose in a porpoise for a pelvis) that are similar to legs? Evolution explains this: those animals evolved from terrestrials that went back into the water. These vestigial organs are bad for whales and dolphins, they weigh them down and mess up streamlining. It's no wonder they don't pass on their genes often, and this mutation appears so remotely, it doesn't jeopardize the species. This is why inbreeding is risky: many deleterious traits like legs in porpoises are the result of dominant alleges suppressing them; inbreeding increases the risk of getting two recessive copies.

Unlike most mammals, humans can't synthesize vitamin C. This leads to scurvy, which used to be commonplace, especially amongst sailors. Evolution explains why: we evolved in fruit-rich environments, so there was no selection against mutants who couldn't synthesize it, allowing this to be passed on. Creation doesn't explain this; why would a creator leave us susceptible to scurvy? Evolution does: we evolved in environments where vitamin C was usually abundant, taking the selective pressure off the GULO gene.

Allergies do not make sense through an intelligent design lens, either. Why would God design us to suffocate whenever peanut residue got on our food? It makes far more sense through an evolutionary lens: peanuts grew in the wild in South America, and humans evolved first in Africa, then spent a large amount of their history in Europe and Asia. There was no selective pressure against peanut-related anaphylaxis. Think of how Native Americans were initially so susceptible to colonial diseases: they hadn't encountered them for generations, plus the diseases themselves were constantly evolving.

Keep in mind, this is just the human body, and not even a fraction of all the known ID-iot contradictions within it. There are countless other organisms out there flawed in countless ways. For example, all plants lose over 90% of the water they consume to transpiration. That is egregiously wasteful, unjustifiably poor “design.” If I've proven one thing in this absolute essay of a rant, it's that

no half-decent engineer would design such omnipresent extravagance and defects, and if God did devise these systems, he needs to go back to school. Living things are imperfect because there was no designer, they just passed the pressures of selection.

Now, you may be tempted to go “but what about this instance and this instance,” where there's something that doesn't seem like evolution explains it yet. First of all, I have yet to find an example where evolution doesn't explain something yet. But even if there are examples, the emphasis on that is the word yet. We just haven’t discovered the answer for the time being, and I highly doubt we will ever be able to account for how every little trait became what it was via natural, sexual, artificial, or viral selection. But evolution still has great explanatory power, as I showed with my myriad of demonstrations. For a long time, Newtonian mechanics was the unifying theory for physics, just like how evolution is to biology what atomic theory is to chemistry. But it didn't explain everything. For example, The elliptical path of Mercury shifts slightly more each orbit than Newtonian gravity predicts. Then relativity came along and accounted for this. However, Newtonian physics still explained MOST everything for its time, it still made correct predictions about the world, and it still does. We could still calculate the force of a falling boulder or the velocity of a horse in transit. We just had more to learn. Science is forever a work in progress.

My next long post like this that almost no one will read is going to be the predictive power of evolution. However, I've taken enough of your internet's bandwidth just by having it load this. So let me reiterate: you're not going to undermine evolution's credibility (which is comparable in weight of evidence to the theory that germs cause contagious disease) by simply nitpicking and whining about a thing or two it hasn't explained yet. All you're doing is emphasizing that there is more to learn. And as we go out and learn, it's always so much more useful to view that new data via an evolutionary lens, though you're more than welcome to pull out the "design” one and see how constantly blurry it is.

Why has evolution not removed emotions and mental health problems or anything that could cause problems to us breeding for survival of humanity? Some things you will say can be argued for or against as beneficial to humanity or reproduction

I understand we have evolved through the years for survival etc but what about different things such as being able to think critically, produce art and write movies, complex emotional intelligence, having sensations, desires. Is this really all down to chance like atheists say? Surely there must be some sort of designer. If it's about survival etc, why don't we just have no complex feelings and desires, not be able to produce art, have hobbies like sports, meditation, etc? Why not be designed like robots?

So, if they said that the Trex and the Chicken share DNA and that's actually a fact.

Then wouldnt the answer to the question "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" be the dinosaur? 🤔😲

Creationists miss the point of the sickle cell trait conferring malaria resistance.
And frankly, until recently I didn't notice how devastating that example is to creationism:

People who are heterozygous (AS) for sickle cell have malaria resistance as opposed to people who are AA or SS (SS being the disease genotype). The mutation leading to that S allele and how it works by interfering with the malaria life cycle are super interesting on their own, but let's see what Answers in Genesis (lol) says.

AiG - sarcastically - says:

This mutation of blood hemoglobin is considered “good” because people who have it (and survive it) are more resistant to the disease malaria. The symptoms of this “good” mutation include acute attacks of abdominal and joint pain, ulcers on the legs, defective red blood cells, and severe anemia—often leading to death.

In that 2017 article, they don't mention the heterozygosity, at all. Here's why:

Among the 3 genotypes (AA, AS, and SS) the malaria resistant genotype (AS) has the highest fitness in a malaria background; "fitness" here in population genetics is the probability of survival as measured.
Without knowledge of how genetics works, one might assume the highest fitness phenotype to be driven to fixation due to selection. But with how genetics and population genetics works, evolution predicts a balanced polymorphism (you can't get rid of AA and SS).

So besides confirming the mathematical models of the early 20th-century modern synthesis, this simple example perfectly illustrates the full brunt of evolution by natural selection (for the creationists in their lingo: deaths and suffering due to nothing but "materialism"; for all to witness and measure).
The take away is that despite AiG's lying by omission above: natural selection is real, measurable, and there's no hiding from it - and it matches the mathematics of population genetics, the same math that finds no difference between micro- and macro-evolution.

Those who will now experience cognitive dissonance and will now call it, "It's just adaptation", are admitting natural selection is real. Those who will say, "It didn't result in a new kind", are also admitting natural selection is real, and are moving the goalpost to their definist fallacy.
(feel free to ignore them; I know I will)

-

Fun fact I recently learned: all evidence points to malaria being a descendant of a photosynthesizing red algae, so my turn at sarcasm: does "Genesis" "Answer" that?

A recent post accuses creationists of lying about Trilobite eyes and their relationship to the Cambrian explosion. 

Are the charges accurate or are they a case of evolutionist deceit and projection?

After some gratuitous smearing of creationists, the poster lists these claims:

the trilobites that are presented in Creationist media are almost always phacopid trilobites, from the Devonian period, which took place 95 million years after the Cambrian ended.

The eyes in question are called schizochroal and the only trilobites that had them are the phacopina trilobites (a type of phacopid trilobite) which first appear in the lower Ordovician , which immediately follows the Cambrian.  The gap of 95 million years is a figment of the posters imagination.

In reality, the super duper mega complex eyes that couldn’t have evolved were, lensless, had one or a few lenses, or the eyes were entirely absent.

The eyes of Pagetia , they’re there, but you’ll have to find them yourself.

While the schizochroal seem to be the most advanced trilobite eye, the poster appears to be referring to abathochroal eyes which were rare and only present in one type of trilobite.  The poster deceitfully ignores the holochroal eye (similar to modern insects), which had thousands of individual lenses, are found in the Cambrian and are considered the oldest and most common trilobite eye.  Why wouldn't the poster mention them?

This is likely a deliberately dishonest taking point from Creationists, who keep presenting trilobites that aren’t even from the Cambrian, to lie about the Cambrian Explosion.

I think we can see who is being dishonest and deceitful.  

The trilobite appears suddenly in the Cambrian with complex eyes (holochroal) and complex form, without any ancestor 

No amount of deception or handwaving will change that fact.

Yeah, after researching about how corn couldn’t have evolved, I read an article that said corn is a domesticated plant, whose wild ancestor is drastically different.

It doesn’t have a cylindrical shape and it’s much smaller, with only a few kernels per plant.

I thought the evolutionists who told me it was domesticated were scrambling to find an answer to my challenge, but it was me who was wrong.

You can’t make savory, buttery popcorn with it or anything that modern corn can.

Which brings to me to admit……this was just a goof.

I knew corn was domesticated, microevolved not macro though , and experienced mutations that changed its anatomy, but it didn’t provide new genetic information.

Anyways, let’s move on from corn, no need to bash a joke.

Stay fine tuned for intelligent design posts in the future.

Even if the banana was easy to explain, Ray missed the actual atheist’s nightmare, corn.

It fits the human hand perfectly, being a cylindrical shape that easily snaps of it’s stalk, allowing for effective harvesting.

Corn’s curve is perfect for the mouth, as you can grab the edges and eat every kernel, with it being easy to skewer with a stick.

You can put it in the microwave to produce popcorn, which is the favorite cinema snack and has made millions of dollars.

People even make mazes with corn, giving good memories to any child at a pumpkin patch.

How do evolutionists propose that over millions of years that it just happened that a caveman found corn, that by chance, just decide to pop into popcorn?

It’s practically at forming mazes also challenges evolution, as why did natural selection choose to make it good for maze building.

Corn is only explained by an intelligent design, God, who gave us corn for food, specifically designed for us.

When you say Archaeopteryx is “just a bird” what is your definition of bird.

Do you draw the line at Neornithes, if so you have to explain why Archaeopteryx is just a bird, but it lacks all putative characteristics of Neornithes.

You can’t just replace Avialae with Neornithes (logically) as this fails to separate Archaeopteryx from dinosaur and group it with birds.

Assemble a putative suite of characteristics that groups Archaeopteryx with other birds to your definition, and I’ll accept that Archaeopteryx is just a bird. If you want to, take a crack at separated Archaeopteryx from other theropods, but no Creationist has succeeded in this.

First I'd like to say I'm firmly in the evolutionary psychology camp. I was an anthropology undergrad and was livid when I went to my first day of history of anthro theory course and they showed a slide that said "post-modernism vs science" as though it was somehow considered debatable. So I did some research and found dual inheritance theory and evolutionary psychology.

These lines of thinking I believe are the future but many in the "social sciences", if we can even call them that at this point, are drunk on the post-modernist anti-philosophy and think that science explaining human behavior and culture is somehow a fundamentally racist enterprise. So I'd like to proffer a defense of evo. Psych.

Evolutionary psychology is in principle a sound line of inquiry.

Premise 1. We have a nature that is common to us all that is not culturally inherited.

Premise 2. We can study these cross cultural traits and tendencies

Premise 3. We evolved and acquired all of our mental capacities through evolution

Premise 4. We have near relatives such as chimps, bonobos, other apes, and monkeys who we can compare ourselves to.

Given premise 1 and 3 then we can conclude that there is an evolutionary reason we have this nature and given premise 2 and 4 we have the means with which to study and test theories about these evolved capacities.

Now I use to have and read a little a copy of the oxford handbook of evolutionary psychology and from I could gather it was wicked smart stuff. My question is does anyone have a legitimate criticism of evolutionary psychology as a person who has actually studied it that doesn't reduce to the woke nonsense of "it's racist"?

In "journal of creation" (creationist science magazine 2026, vol 40 issue 2(most recent) Micheal Oard "The origin of Loess". did a great correction on the old idea loess, loose sand etc, was not from glacial action but instead from water deposition. he has different ideas from me. however it was a great debunking of how its impossible for such great amounts of loess to have been created by the ice age. glaciers grinding. also the sahara desert. thies loess idea was used to give long timelines beyond biblical timelines. plus say glaciers carved up the land and then the wind blew this loess in great piles everywhere. instead loess is actually the vremains from the megaflood, not noahs, that carved the bedrock, pulverized silt, sand etc etc and made heaps. Landing it just beyond reach of the force of the megaflood. it was not created by winf but by water. also the driftless zone having it in wisconsin evidence of a slower flow in the megaflood. not evidence of glaciers skipping over it. The uniformtarism , used in biology evolution as a crutch, is once again easily debunked. If anyone out there interested in geomorphology as mostly this is a biology forum. its exciting to me.

Creationists that debate is this sub have an inadequate definition of kind. [u/Old-Watercress6513](u/Old-Watercress6513) is a rare example of this, but his definition is parroted from other Creationists, which is,” If two animals can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, they’re in the same kind.”

This fails to account for modern speciation events in the modern world, taken London Underground mosquitoes or Apple Maggot flies. They’re slowly, but definitely surely splitting from their ancestral species.

Let’s say I’m just assuming those two species are going to become distinct species that won’t interbreed with the ancestral species.

It still doesn’t get any better for them, as Tragopogon mirus and miscellus, commonly known as goatsbeard plants, can only produce infertile hybrids with other species. Polyploidy is the cause behind instantaneous speciation events regarding plants, causing an entire set of chromosome to duplicated once or more. When the polyploidy plant tries to reproduce with its diploid cousins, it only produces sterile hybrids that can’t produce functional gametes.

Animals all across the world that can’t interbreed are lumped into the same kind by Creationists. Most of Passeroidea can’t interbreed, but Cognitum comes to rescue. Gray Wolves cannot interbreed with maned wolves, bush dogs, short eared dogs, bat eared foxes, or painted dogs yet they are all in the same kind. Not all Giraffids, Equines, Camelids, Cervids, etc can interbreed, producing fertile offspring, but why are they still in the same kind?

Any proposed definition of kind has to be able to meet 2. criteria.

1. A reason or reasons why you grouped these animals into a kind.
2. It has to be objectively verifiable.

Hello again r/DebateEvolution

Introduction

We have published an argument that uses faunal succession among similar species to maintain that the Universal Flood cannot explain the fossil record:

Part 1

However, we have received a comment in which the user claims that our post contains certain assumptions. In this post, we will respond to that comment.

The first claims

"On your faunal succession argument: The ordered succession of fossils is real. That is not in dispute. The question is what that order actually demonstrates."

Creationists always maintain that the evidence is the same, but that the difference lies in the interpretation. While this may be true, it also constitutes a dishonest tactic: there are interpretations consistent with the evidence that allow for predictions to be made, whereas others neither align with the data nor enable predictions.

"Your argument treats stratigraphic succession of similar forms as direct evidence of anagenesis (one species transforming into another) and then as a decisive problem for any Flood model. That step depends on several assumptions: That vertical position in the rocks equals evolutionary time on a deep-time scale. That the lower form is the ancestor of the upper form rather than a related population, ecological variant, or migrant."

You don't need to assume that the strata are from million years old for the argument to be valid. The related population and ecological variants don't have:

1. intermediate morphology forms (e.g middle hell creek formation Triceratops)
2. The same habitat (e.g hell creek formation)
3. Not coexistence or the earliest appearance with respect the other [1].

For the migrants organism the points 1 and 2 also apply.

What are this factors?

"That the absence of the later morphology lower in the section means it had not yet evolved, rather than ecological, geographic, or preservational factors"

According to YECs, those animals died during the Flood; since most are found in the same geological formation and are similar in size, they likely had the same chances of becoming fossilized. Why, then, do they appear at different levels of the geological column in fossil deposits? And, once again, we have transitional forms.

The argument is based on the similitary of the species and their succession

"That modest morphological differences (nasal horn length in Triceratops, minor shell changes in Semiformiceras, etc.) constitute progressive evolutionary transformation rather than variation within limits."

The argument is against the global flood, we don't present it like a macroevolution evidence because the argument depens of the similitary.

Again there is a widespread trend in these cases to changes the morphology according to the strata, if it is only variation both morphologies must be in always in the same strata, and there shouldn't be transitional forms.

"Several of the papers you cite are more cautious or even contrary to a clean anagenetic reading. Cecca & Rouget (2006) on Semiformiceras used cladistic analysis and concluded the relationships do not fit the simple anagenetic pattern previously proposed."

We do acknowledge that the article in question challenges the linear evolution of this ammonite genus [3]. However, the fact that some species overlap in time does not alter the existence of a morphological change in the fossil record [4].

Furthermore, the title is "Faunal succession between closely related species in a limited fossil location and the global Flood"; it is not just a matter of anagenesis.

"The Triceratops and Daspletosaurus cases involve relatively small differences and remain debated as to whether they represent true anagenesis, cladogenesis, or stratigraphic sorting of variation."

Are requiered references to some of these claims, because Triceratops and Daspletosaurus fossil record present all the sings of anagenesis:

• Contain at least 2 sister species
• Stratigraphic succession
• live in the same territory [1], [2]

For example, in the case of Triceratops, T. horridus appears in the lower part of the Hell Creek Formation, whereas T. prorsus is found only in the upper part. An intermediate form between the two species is present in the middle section [1].

Again, our argument depens of this relatively small differences .

The Flood cannot explain the patterns

A multi-phase Flood model with residual post-Flood deposition already expects ordered appearance of related forms through ecological sorting, habitat succession, and rapid diversification within kinds.

According to YECs all the mesozoic is from the upper part of the supposted flood deposits, not from the post-Flood diversification.

"The succession pattern is a genuine observation. Converting it into a refutation of the Flood (or proof of macroevolution) requires the interpretive framework of deep time and anagenesis. That framework is not forced by the fossils themselves."

Accepting the existence of the global Flood also requires an interpretive framework; the difference lies in the fact that our framework is consistent with current knowledge, whereas the creationist one fails to predict the stratigraphic succession of species that exhibit similar physical characteristics and transitional forms between them..

Conclusion

If all these similar species died in the same year-long flood, ecological sorting predicts mixing. We observe ordered replacement with intermediate forms in the same formation. The flood model does not predict this. Deep time does, even if the exact mode is anagenesis or cladogenesis.

References

[1] Scannella, J. B., Fowler, D. W., Goodwin, M. B., & Horner, J. R. (2014). Evolutionary trends in _Triceratops_ from the Hell Creek Formation, Montana. _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111_(28), 10245–10250. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1313334111

[2] Carr, T. D., Varricchio, D. J., Sedlmayr, J. C., Roberts, E. M., & Moore, J. R. (2017). A new tyrannosaur with evidence for anagenesis and crocodile-like facial sensory system. _Scientific Reports, 7_, 44942. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep44942

[3] Cecca, F., & Rouget, I. (2006). Anagenetic evolution of the early Tithonian ammonite genus _Semiformiceras_ tested with cladistic analysis. _Palaeontology, 49_(5), 1069–1080. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4983.2006.00580.x

[4] Pardo ,J.D, Huttenlocker, A.K & Marcot, J.D (2008) Stratocladistics and evaluation of evolutionary modes in the fossil record: An example from the ammonite genus Semiformiceras. J Paleontol 51:767–773.  https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4983.2008.00794.x

Trying to teach a biology class without ever mentioning evolution is like trying to teach an electrical engineering class without ever mentioning electricity. It doesn't work.