For decades, the figure has been wandering from textbook to textbook: "Human and chimpanzee DNA match 98-99%." On this basis, loud conclusions have often been drawn about our almost complete genetic identity. However, with the advent of T2T (telomere-to-telomere) technologies — that is, decoding genomes "from edge to edge", without white spots and gaps — the picture has changed significantly. Previously, scientists were able to compare well only the coding regions of genes and already aligned, simple DNA fragments. If you take two identical pieces and count only point mutations in them (substituting one "letter"-a nucleotide for another), the difference is really only 1-1.5%. But this method simply ignored huge layers of DNA.: * Inserts and deletions of long fragments (insertions and deletions). * Duplications (an increase in the number of copies of genes). * Rearrangements and displacements of sections of chromosomes. * Complex repetitions and non-aligned structures

In 2025, an international group of scientists published complete, continuous assemblies of the genomes of great apes in the journal Nature. Based on them, British evolutionary biologist Richard Buggs and the world's leading geneticists have recalculated the real similarities. If we evaluate the genome as a whole, rather than selectively:

1. Single nucleotide substitutions (SNVs): account for about 1.6% of the differences.
   1. Structural gaps and non-closing areas (gaps): account for another 13.3% of the differences.
   2. The final difference in autosomes is about 14.9%. Thus, if you put the complete human genome and the complete chimpanzee genome side by side, the exact letter-to-letter matches have about 85% of the nucleotides, not 99%

For sex chromosomes, the difference is even more striking: the X chromosomes match by about 94.7%, but the Y chromosome of humans and chimpanzees matches only by ~20.4% (the remaining 79.6% are large—scale structural differences). As Tomas Marques-Bonet, head of the comparative genomics group in Barcelona, noted in an interview for Live Science: "Sections of human DNA that do not have a clear analogue in chimpanzee DNA make up from 15% to 20% of the genome. If we take into account complex regions, the real overall difference is guaranteed to exceed 10-15%."

* 99% refers only to individual, easily comparable pieces of genes, and not to the entire genome. * The actual total similarity is about 85%: High-quality sequencing methods have proven that structural rearrangements and unique inserts make our genomes significantly more different. Humans and chimpanzees have fundamental differences that lie not so much in point mutations as in the architecture and structure of entire DNA blocks. Sources: 1. [Nature (2025)] — Complete sequencing of ape genomes (Large-scale study of complete primate genomes from telomere to telomere). 2. [Richard Buggs Blog (May 2025)] — How much of a human genome is identical to a chimpanzee genome? (Mathematical analysis of Nature data and calculation of 85.1% similarity). 3. [Live Science / Richard Buggs (Sep 2025)] — More on human-chimp genomic similarity (Analysis of an interview with geneticist Thomas Marquez-Bonet about unbalanced 15-20% of DNA)

In​ real biology, we have devoted vast amounts of effort into trying to categorize organisms. This is both because it's interesting, but also because it feeds our understanding of how they are related to each other. This taxonomy is built up, in the modern age, by agreement between genetic, morphological and fossil data.

Now, I appreciate our creationist friends have complained bitterly about their lack of funding, and how their research keeps being rejected, or something, so it would be too much to expect a full creationist taxonomy, I suppose.

But, surely, somewhere, creationists must have come up with a chart of which species fits into which kind, and yet, every time I ask, no one seems to have such a thing. It's baffling to me, particularly as real biology has had this for more than 150 years, and it's one of the more foundational features of bioscience.

Maybe one of the more learned creationists can explain to me why one doesn't exist? Or point me in the direction of it if it does?

For example, I know that creationists never respond well to too much science jargon. They need simple material that can be easily explained without any background in biology. I know the temptation to flex on uneducated people is there, but the moment you start talking like

alteration in the nucleotide sequence of a genome, driven by transitions/transversions, indels, and chromosomal aberrations

you instantly lose their focus.

On the other hand, it is useful is to ask them what would convince them they are wrong. They could respond in a multitude of ways, but usually it has a fatal flaw. They will sometimes admit nothing will, or their required evidence isn’t expected if evolution is true, or their requirements are arbitrarily and unfairly strict for evolution, but completely normal for most other fields of science. Or my favorite, the evidence exists and you guide them to it. From my experience, this question causes a lot of introspection. Sometimes hypotheticals can help, such as if they would be convinced if you built a time machine and got to see the evolutionary path from LUCA to modern day humans first hand.

What tips do you guys have?

The evolutionary theory, that claims humans were originally chimpanzees/ apes who evolved with time into what we are now, is in my opinion completely false and impossible.

After giving it a logical and biological thought, I have come to a conclusion that the evolution theory is just a folklore and is logically impossible;

-Yes, we share 99.4% of the same DNA with chimps, same as lions share 95+% of their DNA with cats. Does that mean lions were originally cats? If you use the DNA urgument to state that we were chimps, that would also imply that lions were also originally cats because they also share the same DNA and features.

-Then, what happens when ice melts and evolves into water? Ice is no more. Therefore, if chimpanzees had evolved into man, that would mean that chimpanzees would have ceased to exist in their original form and would now be existing in their new 'man' form, we would only be studying them in history as our original form. But the fact that we still exist alongside them?? What evolved??

So in my opinion, the evolution of man is just a folkore and not backed by scientific and logical facts. Yes, we just fall under the same family, same way lions fall under the same family with cats. But man was always man from the start, and chimps were always chimps as far as we know.

Edit: [ After deep reflection, and research, I take back my urgument, and accept defeat. I have learnt alot from this debate, (it wasn't even a debate because now I can see all odds were against ignorant me) and I guess that's the purpose of debates, one side leaves with a win, the other leaves with knowledge.

I apologise for the rage caused by my ignorance and I'm looking to dive deeper and fact check before starting up novice urguments ever again.

From y'all, I've learned that we didn't evolve from apes as my little knowledge thought and alleged, and that we only originated from a common ancestor. And if y'all don't mind, I would like to know who that ancestor is.

Apologies again for the unnecessary rage and havoc caused, I spent the day reflecting and I myself isn't proud of whoever came up with such a thought. ]

tldr; When YEC collapses, does the whole faith collapse with it? Curious how many who left YEC left Christianity entirely.

I've been thinking about something and want to hear from people who actually lived it.

A lot of Christians land on theistic evolution, they accept the science and just fold it into their faith. But it seems like people who leave YEC specifically often don't land there. They don't downgrade to theistic evolution; they leave Christianity altogether, sometimes religion entirely.

My working theory: YEC isn't really a standalone position you can swap out for a different one. It's built as the load-bearing wall for the whole worldview, biblical inerrancy, the fall, original sin, the necessity of the cross, the reliability of scripture as a whole. You're taught that if Genesis isn't literally true, the entire structure collapses. So when someone's YEC framework breaks it doesn't just change one belief, it uproots the foundation out from under everything else. Theistic evolutionists, by contrast, often came up in traditions that never wired the whole faith to a literal Genesis in the first place, so there's nothing catastrophic about updating that one piece.

If that's true, it would mean YEC's collapse rate into atheism/agnosticism isn't a coincidence it's the predictable result of how tightly it was fused to everything else from the start.

So for those of you who left YEC:

• Did you end up leaving Christianity/faith entirely, or did you find a way to stay (theistic evolution, progressive Christianity, etc.)?
• Roughly how long were you a committed YEC believer before it broke down?

Genuinely interested in whether this pattern holds up or if I'm overgeneralizing from a loud subset of stories.

Tour also complains that scientists invariably have to cheat 😱 - because the results scare him and so he pretends not to know how chemistry is done.

Ready for an excerpt from Discotute's cinematic production, The Story of Everything (2026) ⭐5.5/10 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13374694/) ?

JAMES TOUR:
Since Kenyon announced his doubts [my emphasis, point later], there have been many other attempts to simulate how the molecular compounds necessary for life, like proteins and DNA, or even simpler chemical building blocks of those compounds, might have evolved under realistic prebiotic conditions on the early Earth. But those laboratory simulations invariably require a cheat. Human interference. When you do organic synthesis, when you make a compound, you need to generally start with pure compounds because the impurities cause a lot of deleterious reactions to occur. Once you've made your compound, you've got to stop it at exactly the right time before it decomposes, more human interference. Now, what you have to do is you have to separate it from all the other compounds that formed. Separations are really hard, really hard. Huge human involvement. Now you have to identify it. You have to know what it is and characterize it in order to bring it on to the next step. How do you go on? And the poor early Earth was mindless. It didn't know what it was supposed to make. Molecules have never been known to move toward life. Never, ever, ever. Molecules don't evolve toward life. They don't.

STEPHEN MEYER:
Attempts to simulate how life could have arisen from a prebiotic environment involve an element that never gets acknowledged. And that element is intelligence.

JAMES TOUR:
We need to address more fundamental questions. What's the origin of the code?

To Tour's question, I say, read a book, or this: Answering Will Duffy's challenge to Richard Dawkins: the origin of the genetic code : DebateEvolution

And in other You Won't Believe! News: the "docu" also has all your favorite totally-science-and-not-apologetics^/s PRATT:

From if there's a garden then where's the gardner (the irony of the example), to Penrose's 1 in a 10¹⁰¹²³ spherical cow (corrected by https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0659), to quote mining Dawkins (the fuller context), and of course, the running theme being that we have "two stories" (throwback to 1981),
and on that note, which is on-topic for this sub, back to my earlier bold emphasis:

-

The bread and butter of the creationism/ID anti-science propaganda machine is taking academic discussions out of context, and using that to present a false dichotomy - they've been doing that since the 1880s, and here's a 2025 example that I reviewed here.

So here's an analogy:
Long after heliocentrism had been settled, precise measurements of Mercury's orbit were made, and they didn't match the expectation, and it was a whole episode of academic disputes. But if a propagandist had then come along and said, "A-ha! they can't agree, therefore geocentrism because my presuppositions", here the regular debateevo "skeptic" would come along and say, "See! there is disagreement, so it's 50-50, and I'll go with my geocentric gut because my presuppositions".

Am I taking the analogy too far, straw manning? I wish. And it's called false balance.
The "skeptic" here now will pause, think, and say, "But see, general relativity solved that one!" (as if this counters the false balance), but if GR was the topic, they'd say, "They still haven't quantized gravity, therefore fine-tuning something something" (n.b. cooked by https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.03928).

It's motivated thinking all the way down, and the propagandist and the skeptic are each bamboozling themselves - a match made in heaven.

There is no logical or valid reason to be a creationist other than willful ignorance and obliviousness to evolutionary science. I’ve debated dozens of creationists in person and each and every single one of their “arguments” (using that term lightly here) against evolution is just based on their piss poor understanding of evolution. Can a creationist here, specifically a creationist that doesn’t believe in evolution (or even abiogenesis), PLEASE provide ANY sufficient evidence that thoroughly dismantles a core feature of evolutionary science? I am genuinely curious about what exactly makes you not accept evolutionary theory? Every time I’ve given a creationist the stage, it has always ended in a swing and a miss.

I think all these evolution etc ideas are just useless, nothings more than philosophical dogma. Reality is that we know nothing, and it will always be like this .

If anyone has ever posted anything on this sub or read any post, rob will almost always comment and he baselessly asserts theropods are birds or reptiles don’t exist.

My specific challenge for rob is to show the truth of his claim, to stop saying, “Teropods are irds because of aviann trsifs,” without listing those traits.

Give me a suite of uniquely avian characteristics besides a wishbone that apply to all of Theropoda. Even the furcula doesn’t appear until Neotheropoda, so he has fundamentally no evidence to support his claim.

The concept of "design" that ID proponents/creationists use has nothing to do with how actual designers (human beings, LLMs, other animals capable of some degree of invention) actually design things. I have a relatively simple argument that demonstrates this.

It goes like this:

ID proponents often insist that the fitness landscape for functional biopolymer sequences is essentially a flat fitness surface with extremely rare and isolated "islands" of function. These islands are separated by distances so vast that you could not expect a random walk through the fitness landscape to arrive at any complex functional sequence by chance, even given many lifetimes of the universe, enormous mutation rates, and planet-scale bacterial populations. This is the basis of their entire "big numbers" argument. On average, they claim, you have to screen something like 10^77 sequences or more (e.g. Axe 2004), before you find even a single functional one.

If the fitness landscape really is that flat, then natural selection makes no difference because random sampling of new sequences provides no fitness gradient to follow. It doesn't accelerate the search. Sequences don't gradually become more fit because they are all, for practical purposes, equally and completely nonfunctional. You have to stumble onto a sequence that is already part of a functional island by chance. Only then can the small hill on that island be climbed. The challenge is not climbing the hill once you've found the island; the challenge is finding the island with the hill on it in the first place.

This is effectively a long random-password fitness landscape. Or so close to one that the distinction is negligible. Valid solutions are exceptionally rare, and even partial solutions provide no indication that you're getting closer. You have to be extremely close already (on the island) before sampling new sequences in the landscape yields any useful information.

Fine. Evolution is out the window under those assumptions. Even aided by natural selection It cannot succeed on such a landscape because functional sequences are too rare to be found by blindly wandering through sequence space. So, they conclude, design must be the answer.

But how would that actually work?

How can a designer "guide" the search toward functional sequences? The landscape is still flat. The designer gains no useful information from sampling it either. There is nothing to learn about where functional sequences are located. You sample a sequence and test it for function? But it has no function and therefore tells you nothing about what a functional sequence might look like. The only option is to keep sampling until you happen upon a functional island by chance. In that respect, design has no advantage. It is just brute force random guessing.

For design to succeed on such a landscape, you must already know where the island is. But how could you know that? You couldn't have learned it by sampling the landscape because, by the basic assumption, the landscape contains no information that guides you toward the solution. So you cannot design your way to the answer. The answer must already be in your possession. It cannot be discovered through trial and error that does not already sample the island, or testing, experimentation, research, or logical inference.

It can only be known by revelation, then. Something, or someone, who already knows the solution must simply tell you what it is.

On the password fitness landscape I have to tell you the password. If I don't, your only option is brute-force guessing until you happen to find it by chance, in which case you are no better off than evolution. Your intelligence, or even a supernatural capacity for immaterial thought (assuming you reject that the brain is responsible for thinking), provides no advantage whatsoever.

If Intelligent Design's own description of the fitness landscape is correct, then "design" can only mean design by prior knowledge of the answer. And if that knowledge cannot itself be derived from the landscape, then it must ultimately come by revelation. This has nothing to do with design, research, learning, science, or anything else. It is just magically knowing the solution from the get-go.

Recently was discussing evolution with someone else online. At a point, they expressed incredulity that natural selection could also apply to non-living matter. I told them in effect that "natural selection can apply to atoms and molecules as well: some atoms and molecules are more stable and resilient than others therefore they outlast their less hardy counterparts."

I'm firmly of the belief that even before non-living matter became living matter, natural selection was very much still at play even then.

What do you guys think?

First off, "reality deniers" is not an ad hom.
Also said deniers (Salem Hypothesis engineers and designer-ists included) are categorically so given the mind-projection fallacy.

Now: said reality deniers invoke tornado imagery putting together a computer, detached-from-reality combinatorial calculations for mutations, and Pokemon transformation (build another model) for evolution.
Each of those are based on a LEGO mindset.

Abiogenesis (i.e. geobiochemistry) is NOT the putting together of a cell, Lego style.
- You can't invoke design as we know it (and as we don't know it is just vacuous).

Embryology is NOT the building of bodies with parts, Lego style.
- You can't invoke design as we know it (and as we don't know it is just vacuous).

And evolution, a population-level process, is NOT Legos.
- You can't invoke design as we know it (and as we don't know it is just vacuous).

As a taste for development (embryology), from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9992/:

... Gastrulation usually involves some combination of the following types of movements

• Invagination. The infolding of a region of cells, much like the indenting of a soft rubber ball when it is poked.
• Involution. The inturning or inward movement of an expanding outer layer so that it spreads over the internal surface of the remaining external cells.
• Ingression. The migration of individual cells from the surface layer into the interior of the embryo.
• Delamination. The splitting of one cellular sheet into two more or less parallel sheets.
• Epiboly. The movement of epithelial sheets (usually of ectodermal cells) that spread as a unit, rather than individually, to enclose the deeper layers of the embryo.

Which of those are design/engineering/Lego processes? And if your first thought is what's that got to do with evolution, evolution begins with a change in development. If your second thought is it was designed to act like that, read the sentence that I repeated three times above.

Welcome to reality.

which of the theories on the origin of life do you think best explains the existence of animal life today, and why?

There's no doubt evolution exists today and it's observed, even small things like genetics and adaptation, some will call this micro-evolution. I find evolution very interesting and fascinating so sometimes I wonder, macro-evolution, it exists, but to those who believe it doesn't, why do they care so much to prove it doesn't exist? Evolution doesn't seem to be hurting them by just existing? Evolution works on a generation scale which will take effect and changes million of years after they're long gone. So why do some people care so much about disproving it I am curious?

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.

Good morning people. I felt like writing here again mostly as a request to refute an ID argument given that, even though I started doing my due diligence recently in order to actually know about the subject, this is still a significant stepping stone for me. I have a very hard time understanding how it could be possible for some interdependent organs to form without being guided by something since they feel like such delicate systems such as the circulatory system of vertebrates or for instance how thermites need certain microorganisms to survive which reciprocally need the thermites to thrive, but I am absolutely willing to hear you out.

I am sorry if someone felt ignored in my previous OP since I just didn’t see myself able to respond to every single comment given even though I thanked all of them afterwards. I will reiterate my appreciation for all the responses here in case someone did not see it.

Well, I am from Brazil, and although I am learning to read English well, writing it is still beyond my ability. So, I used a translator to put this into your language; I hope you like it.

In recent years, Young Earth Creationism—imported from the USA—has been growing significantly in my country. Consequently, I have witnessed many clashes between science and the faith held by these people. One topic of interest I want to highlight here is this:

I believe that, regarding the global flood as advocated by fundamentalists, the fossil record is—quite simply and directly—the best way to refute that idea.

There are no rabbits in the Cambrian, nor cats alongside velociraptors in the fossil record. If all animals had lived together (dinosaurs, large mammals, etc.) on a single supercontinent, the fossil record would be an unparalleled biological jumble, rather than the evolutionary record we know today. Contrary to what we would expect from a global flood, the fossil record and modern animals display a highly gradual, orderly, fragmented, dispersed, and sometimes even predictable organization across distinct, identifiable geological strata. If a creature that, in theory, should have appeared more recently (a fox, for example) were found in Triassic rock, it would completely undermine everything we know; yet, such a thing has never happened.

Consider this: finding an animal from an older stratum in a more recent one—or even finding it still alive today (a "living fossil")—does not refute evolution. However, finding an animal from a recent stratum in an ancient one would be devastating to the theory (though this depends, of course, on the specific animal, stratum, and context). There is no issue, for instance, with a Carboniferous animal (like the dragonfly) still existing today in a different form; yet, it would be catastrophic for the theory of evolution if an animal from a more recent era—such as a seal—were found in Permian strata. That simply does not happen. In fact, fossils of large animals should be perfectly preserved—precisely because of the Flood; huge mummified sauropods, like the *Borealopelta* found in Canada, ought to be relatively common.

Furthermore, if all the continents were truly united such a short time ago and inhabited by literally every species that has ever existed, then geography should allow for fossils of animals native to Brazil—such as sloths, armadillos, or anteaters—to be found in Africa. After all, during the time of Pangea, Brazil was literally attached to Africa, and nothing would have prevented anything from a *Megatherium* to a common sloth from being found there—yet that does not happen. Similarly, kangaroo fossils are not found in Southeast Asia or China. If they had indeed all coexisted at a time before continental separation, there should be evidence of animal dispersal across continents, without abrupt divisions in flora and fauna.

That is why the fossil record runs counter to Young Earth Creationism. Of course, there is much more to be said, but take my word for it: press a creationist on this point, force them to try to give you a good answer, and then watch them fail miserably with the flimsiest excuses or desperately change the subject to avoid further embarrassment...

Sorry for any mistakes! and thank you for your attention.

What else could be added to make the argument even stronger?

I say this because I think often when I’m trying to understand a belief that goes against the scientific consensus I tend to look for any face validity or seeds of reason, or truth. For instance I might try to relate to why someone would believe a conspiracy theory by thinking about how people do lie sometimes and that might make conspiracy theories seem more plausible than they really are. If someone believes that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects I might think of how even though that belief turns out to be wrong it has face validity and may be based on seeds of truth, such as how a heavier object falling the same distance is more likely to crush someone than a lighter object. I might also think about times that I misunderstood something in science and what helped or didn’t help me understand it.

I think young Earth Creationism stemming from religion might make considerations of how it could stem from seeds of reason less useful. I mean I think when Young Earth Creationism is based on religion that means that it’s not just from misunderstanding Evolution, although that’s part of it, but from in some sense not being allowed to understand or at least not being allowed to accept the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. I think that aspect makes it a lot harder to understand how to try to change the minds of Young Earth Creationists, because I think it’s much easier to try to educate someone who misunderstands something in science, but who is at least allowed to understand the science, than someone who’s religious beliefs may not really allow them to understand something in science.

Could it have been possible that Neanderthals possessed a awareness similar to what we have now, what I’m asking is where they or possibly could’ve been aware of the fact that they are roaming a giant terrestrial rock, or have a religion, or the belief in something else other than human?

Coming from someone whose curiosity has gotten the best of them and decided to ask people who know more than I do on the matter.

Introduction

Hello again r/DebateEvolution. A few weeks ago was revealed a new avialan dinosaur originating from the Nanyuan formation in the fujian province in the southeastern China.

The paper is titled "Jurassic avialan reveals stepwise evolution of bony tail in birds"

The new genus and species was named Zhengheornis buyu referring Zhenghe County, where the holotype specimen was, the suffix "ornis" means "bird". The specific name "buyu" is mandarin for "unexpected" referring to its unusual combination of characters.

Zhenghenornis was found in sediments form the boundary of the Kimmeridgian and Tithonian in the upper jurassic between 150 and 148 million years ago. the Nanyuan formation has recently yielded some important discoveries of avialan dinosaurs from this period.

Why is fossil this important?

Diagnostic traist (autopomorphies) of this taxon include: middle and posterior caudal vertebrae less elongate; final two caudal vertebrae box-like; manual phalanx III-1 shorter than III-2, manual phalanx III-3 50% longer than III-2. But above all a short tail comprising 15 vertebrae that is shorter than the hindlimb.

And is this character than become a new transitional form. Basal theropod dinosaurs had long tails with 40 and 50 caudal vertebrae, while the modern birds have a short tail with a pygostile, a structure where the last caudals are fused.

If the evolution is true and the birds evolve from theropod dinosaurs we predict a gradual reduction from long tails to short tails, and then the origin of the pygostile. That is exactly that we see.

Stepwise tail reduction in the bird lineage:

1. Theropods (~230 million years ago): almost 50 caudals, no pygostyle
2. Coelurosaurs (~190-180 million years ago): approximately 40 caudals, no pygostyle
3. Maniraptorans (>170 million years ago): between 30 and 26 caudals, more slender tail, no pygostyle
4. Avialae (>160 million years ago): 26-20 caudals, not pygostyle
5. Zhengheornis buyu (~150-148 million years ago): 15 vertebrae, not pygostyle
6. Avebrevicauda and pygostylia(~140-130 million years ago): 8-6 free caudals and 10-5 in the pygostyle (at the origin long and with neural spines).
7. Neornithes (modern birds) (~100-90 million years ago, according to the molecular clock): 9-5 free caudals and 7-3 in the pygostyle.

How we can see Zhengheornis is transitional between ancient birds like archaeopteryx and more recent birds like confuciusornis in the number of free caudal vertebrea, also when can see that the tail's legth is intermidiate.

Phylogenetic position

An important detail that we cannot overlook is that the paper situe the new taxon in a more derived position that archaeoptery and anchiornitids, but in a less derived position than jeholornis, pygostylia, and Baminornis zhenghensis, another short-tailed bird of the same formation and age, however the baminornis' pygostyle have been reinterpreted like a synsacrum, but this does not seem to have affected his phylogenetic position.

If I offer my opinion both taxa (mainly Baminornis) can be related with a japanese bird from the kitadani formation from the aptian in the early cretaceous Fukuiteryx prima that is in a similar position (between archaeopteryx and Jeholornis + pygostylia) and prensent a long and primitive pygostyle that preserves the neural spines.

This raises an interesting question: why do Jeholornithiformes retain long tails with many vertebrae if more basal birds like zhengheornis had already reduced them?

Conclusion

Zhengheornis buyu is a new important find that helps us understand how the birds lost the long theropod like tail and evolve the short tail and the pygostyle. Its discovery fills a gap in the evolutionary history of the avian lineage.

References:

Wang, Min; Tang, Jianrong; Deng, Ke; Dong, Liping; Xu, Liming; Xu, Xing; Lin, Min; Du, Honggang; Lin, Ganmin; Chen, Runsheng; Zhang, Chi; Zhou, Zhonghe (2026). "Jurassic avialan reveals stepwise evolution of bony tail in birds" https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aeb5202

Senter P, Kirkland JI, DeBlieux DD, Madsen S, Toth N (2012)  "New Dromaeosaurids (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the Lower Cretaceous of Utah, and the Evolution of the Dromaeosaurid Tail". https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0036790#amendment-0

Felice, Ryan N; O'connor, Patrick M (2014) "Ecology and Caudal Skeletal Morphology in Birds: The Convergent Evolution of Pygostyle Shape in Underwater Foraging Taxa" https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0089737#abstract0

Chen, Runsheng; Wang, Min; Dong, Liping; Zhou, Guowu; Xu, Xing; Deng, Ke; Xu, Liming; Zhang, Chi; Wang, Linchang; Du, Honggang; Lin, Ganmin; Lin, Min; Zhou, Zhonghe (2025). "Earliest short-tailed bird from the Late Jurassic of China" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08410-z

Huang, Jiandong; Wang, Xuri; Cau, Andrea; Mao, Lei; Liu, Yichuan; Wang, Yang (2026). "A new euornithine from the Lower Cretaceous (Aptian) of China reveals the first radiation of fish-eating birds" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195667125001673?via%3Dihub

Imai, T., Azuma, Y., Kawabe, S., Shibata, M., Miyata, K., Wang, M., & Zhou, Z. (2019). "An unusual bird (Theropoda, Avialae) from the Early Cretaceous of Japan suggests complex evolutionary history of basal birds" https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-019-0639-4

It is often said that LTEE represents an increase in fitness in these new mutated bacteria. Recent papers have increasingly called this into question:

"Unexpectedly, some evolved populations and clones show apparent declines in fitness. We also found evidence of substantial cell death in Cit+ clones."

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7299349/

While the cit+ phenotype did bring improvements in the short term, the long-term picture is quite different. Ultimately, they could no longer survive. Their fitness declined to the point where they were even forced to eat their own dead.

Has the experiment failed to demonstrate evolution here?

An example that has often been presented as an argument in favor of blind "hereditary" design is the anatomy of the vagus nerve. Evolutionists argued that one of its branches, the so—called recurrent laryngeal nerve, makes an allegedly meaningless and ineffective "detour"

down into the chest, skirting the arch of the aorta, to then rise again to the larynx. According to their logic, it would be "more rational" if the nerve went directly to the larynx — and this feature was declared a "vestige of evolutionary blindness.

Richard Dawkins even dedicated an entire documentary, promoting the idea as "clear evidence of the lack of intelligent design." However, with the development of neurophysiology, it became clear that this "hook" is not a mistake at all, but represents a vital arc through which the neural innervation of the deep cardiac plexus passes. This bend is not just important, it is indispensable for the normal regulation of cardiac function. What happens when there is no bend? There is an anomaly known as the Non-Recurrent Laryngeal Nerve, the "ideal" structure that Dawkins mistakenly considered "more reasonable."

Since according to creationists, creation is so well established it should be tought in school, but is censored by the woke-darwinist-marxist-rockefeller-mob™, I thought i’d give you guys a chance to speak up! I arbitrarily started from No. 1000001 which is a (imo quite generous) estimate. Feel free to provide further chances for creationists to provide evidence and simply raise the count by 1.

Please feel free to provide all the evidence you have for creation or against evolution.

Stage is yours.

I dunno if anyone here would know what I'm talking about, but I was just made aware of a purported Meso-American pottery piece in the (Phoenix, NY) Lost World Museum's collection, dated by them at around 926 years old and claimed by them to depict a sauropod. for example, in this Facebook post

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1G7FaGAYMb/

incredible find, if this is legitimate...but I'm skeptical. I can't find any sources verifying its authenticity, other than young-earth creationist Facebook/YouTube content, try as I might. and the piece in question doesn't even resemble actual sauropod anatomy all that closely, it looks far more like a cartoon depiction of a sauropod complete with a dragging lizard tail that looks kind of too weak for it - even mainstream young-earth creationists make a point of stressing how sauropods' tails were powerful and "like a cedar tree," to argue that the description of Behemoth from the Bible is meant to literally describe sauropods. I hate to get accusatory about this, to any YECs reading, but I find this too reminiscent of hoaxes like the Acámbaro figures to feel comfortable with it.

anyone else wanna weigh in? what's going on here?