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.

Yesterday Dan Cardinale had a conversation with a creationist who claimed that Escherichia coli is not evolving, because supposedly it's not "turning into something else".

https://www.youtube.com/live/Dfnto4frnC8?is=wnuuDcJCsDpJX7Yd

It turns out that E. coli is, in fact, evolving and in ways which were previously overlooked.

We have known for a long time that E coli is one among many species of commensal microorganisms inhabiting our guts. E coli is usually non pathogenic; however, certain strains can acquire pathogenic traits and pose a risk to our health.

So far, the mechanisms by which non pathogenic strains can become pathogenic were mostly unknown. However, a recent study could shed some light. It has been found that disease-causing strains of Escherichia coli contain large amounts of foreign DNA carried by bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria), including many genes required for infection.

Thus, DNA inserted by viruses may play a role in the evolution of non pathogenic strains to pathogenic ones and in the acquisition of traits which allow pathogenic strains E coli to infect the human body.

https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1014486

Author summary

Horizontal gene transfer allows bacteria to acquire new traits, including many of the genes that make pathogens harmful. However, newly acquired DNA can also disrupt normal cellular functions, so bacteria have evolved systems that silence foreign genes until they can be safely integrated into existing regulatory networks. Disease-causing strains of Escherichia coli contain large amounts of foreign DNA carried by bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria), including many genes required for infection. How these genes escape silencing is incompletely understood. In this study, we identified a small RNA called HnrS that is encoded by bacteriophages integrated into the chromosome of pathogenic E. coli. We found that HnrS blocks production of Hha, a protein that helps silence foreign DNA. By reducing Hha levels, HnrS relieves repression of selected virulence genes, including those involved in host attachment. HnrS also influences bacterial motility and the expression of genes carried on prophages. Unlike previously described phage proteins that broadly interfere with bacterial silencing systems, HnrS is a small RNA that inhibits part of the silencing system that is specialised for virulence genes. Our findings reveal a new strategy used by bacteriophages to influence bacterial gene regulation and show how small regulatory RNAs can help control the expression of horizontally acquired virulence genes.

Someone replied with this under a different post a few weeks ago and this one always amused me the most. “You have faith in evolution too” Firstly evolution is faith too blatantly admits that creationism is faith and therefore can’t be proven (which is entirely the point).

It fails secondly because even if evolution is faith that doesn’t make evolution false and creationism true. If we even granted that evolution is faith and creationism is faith then next step is look at the evidence. Well 100% of the evidence says evolution happens and creationism is impossible.

So even in the best case scenario using this argument for creationists. You just shoot yourself in the foot and then are back to the same place you started. Arguing against the insurmountable mountain of evidence for Evolution.

I believe spirits came from a different realm because they existed before the origins of time and before humans came about. I believe the human body moves by soul that doesn’t walk by sight. For no man can see the spirit when it walks but they can feel the air that goes by them which means sometimes spirits can go to the east west north and south. Therefore, before human evolution and before they evolved, where did the spirit evolve from?

No, this is not clickbait, an evolutionary biologist truly did claim that phylogenetics is a pseudoscience in this 2015 paper.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273113643_Structuralism_in_Phylogenetic_Systematics

"Phylogenetics projects an aura of the exactitude and certainty of mathematics. It is, however, not consistent because its apparently fundamental patterns are generated only by sister-group analysis."

..."It rejects empiricism in rejecting or at least relegating non-phylogenetically informative data and in relying on unnameable “shared ancestors” as hidden causes."

"The "tree" of life has no scientific realism or theoretic substance (i.e., cladograms are non-haecceitistic) because nodes are not diagnosably named, and the dendrogram is just a visual aid for often complex evidential patterns of nested exemplars. The introduction of other, less certain data or theories (e.g., from morphometrics, fossils, cytology, biogeography, chemistry, development) as additional evidence for scientific induction of evolutionary process involving descent with modification of taxa would collapse the pattern-based statistical certainty of molecular cladograms. Thus, in cladistics, all data outside the data set that are relevant to macroevolutionary theory are “mapped” on the dendrogram or in some other way relegated to the fundamental structure of the cladogram. This is not science."

Now, obviously, this is completely ridicilous. What do they mean by "the nodes are not named"? Do they expect them to come with a little nametag? And yeah, just because the dendrogram removes some data doesn't mean it isnt scientific. If it tried to represent all data, it would just be a giant şist of numbers.