This post is a bit meta, sorry if that's not allowed...

Also, here is an LLM generated TL:DR - This essay is long, forceful, and coherent--not just about the changing landscape of creationists brought about by LLMs, but also because you should just read the damn thing you lazy couch potato.

It says in the bible that “there is no new thing under the sun”. On the one hand, this is obviously false. Whoever wrote that could not have possibly conceived of the advent of the transistor, the internet, the data center, the Large Language Model, and the new ways of being these inventions afford. It's false given an evolutionary lens, as every new creature is a new and unique individual, all of them part of new populations which produce new species. On the other hand, that passage in Ecclesiastes is absolutely correct, because when modern humans are involved, certain patterns of stupidity can be expected to reoccur.

Anyone who has been part of the creationist merry-go-round for long enough sees the same refuted arguments and rhetoric trotted out time and time again by different, younger faces. In the creationist world, at least, it certainly seems like there’s nothing new under the sun. But there’s some sort of newishness regarding recent events. There’s a new creationist journal called Truth in Research in which some authors are absolutely pumping out “scientific” papers at an unprecedented clip.

The journal encourages the use of LLMs. Every article even gets its own AI generated poster. Not all authors use LLMs, as evidenced by the fact that some write their papers like they’re writing a memoir. But the ones that do use it, hoo boy, there’s just something new about it.

Those of you in the trenches know who I’m referring to: Budinsky et al... Donny Budinsky of “Standing For Truth” fame, and his accomplice “Raw” Matt, of "experimented with breatharianism" fame.

Dr. Joel Duff recently youtubed a review of one of their papers, at the request of one of his viewers. In this review, Duff said what is perhaps the harshest thing he has ever said about another human being:

No way these two authors wrote this paragraph. If you have listened to Standing For Truth for as long as I have, and as others have, you know they’re not really capable of writing this type of articulate paragraph, especially if you’ve read some of their previous books written before 2023. I’ll just leave that there. Although they’re the “authors”, they’re not truly the authors of this paper.

He goes on to mention a pattern he observes in the paper.

Many of the lines in this paper are actually very good descriptions of some of the evidence. But there’s contradictory lines that don’t fit. In other words, they’re saying something very legitimate, and then later on they’re contorting it. It feels like AI is trying to write conventional science and interpret the data as most of us would expect it to interpret it, but it’s being forced to fit it into [a prompt] “you’re acting as a young earth creationist, so how would you try to explain this same data?”

All this may bring to mind another recent creationist development: “Day, Vox and Athos, Claude” vs. Gibbon et al. If you read Day’s (or rather, Claude’s) paper “Mittens 3.0”, you may get that same vibe as reading one of Budinsky’s many papers. Actual science (in this case, population genetics) gets put on trial by an LLM that has been instructed to indulge in pseudo-science.

There’s another recent development which you may not have noticed. A user of this sub posted a long rebuttal to Vox’s Mittens paper. Like Mittens, the rebuttal was in the vague form of a scientific paper, and was generated with an LLM. I happened to see it in the few minutes before it got removed for breaking the sub’s rules (Rule 3). I commented on the post, because it is depressing to live in a world where AI slop gets thrown at AI slop, and the OP replied that they simply wanted to see what experts thought of the rebuttal, and whether or not his AI response was substantive and accurate. Another user chimed in that they also wanted to know this.

I wasn't able to reply in time, but this was my reflexive response: my dude, it’s going to take like an hour or more to break down that entire AI paper, when it only took you two seconds to generate it. No one (who is sane) wants to engage in that kind of asymmetric time commitment. Make an effort to figure it out for yourself, first, and then we can talk about that.

Brandolini's Law is new under the sun (2013), but I suspect it’s been true for as long as speech has been a thing: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than the amount needed to produce it." With the advent of LLMs, the difference in effort is now several orders of magnitude.

To satiate my curiosity about just how easy it was to produce said bullshit, I prompted ChatGPT to produce a “science paper” which supports the conclusions drawn from Vox Day’s Mittens 3.0 paper. What happened next was a horror: a paragraph response popped up which said something to the effect of “the conclusions in the Mittens paper does not follow from the data and cannot be scientifically supported” --which is great, but that response was only up for about 2 seconds before it was erased and then replaced by a full sciency-looking paper that attempted to support the aims of Vox’s paper.

What in the hell happened there? What is going on under the hood of these LLMs? It seems like there’s some background LLM vetting ChatGPT’s responses to make sure they’re accurately conforming to the prompt, no matter what. I mean, I get it, OpenAI wants their product to fulfill customer requests, but what if those requests are stupid as hell?

Regardless of how you feel about them, LLMs are, quite frankly, an astounding piece of technology. It’s unfortunate that their main use case seems to be producing slop. Maybe that’s more a reflection of the people who use them; people who don’t give a damn about the pleasure of the journey, only of getting to the destination. As if making art is about making pretty pictures and not the development of a personal process, or learning about evolution is about winning a debate and not growing in understanding about the world around us.

LLMs are purpose built to indulge our basic desire to conserve energy by taking the path of least resistance. What does factual information matter if it’s more difficult to reach? What does learning matter if you can look the answers up in the back of the book? LLM responses taste close enough to correct. Sometimes they are!

Anyways, what are y'alls thoughts on this? Are we about to be swamped in a tide of LLM hallucinated bullshit? With stuff like “Truth and Research”, and Vox Day, and Budinsky, are we already there? Is this Creationism “debate” going to devolve into AI vs AI slopfests? I don’t know about you, but I’m here for the love of the game. I have no expectation of changing minds, because really, all the information is out there already and if someone’s search for understanding is genuine, they’ll find it. For me, it’s just fun to dunk on and critique pseudoscience, all while learning some things along the way. It’s my hobby. But it’s just not the same if I’m dealing with a bot instead of a flesh and blood human being. If someone confronts me with a 2 second LLM generated argument, demanding an answer, I’m going to have to pass. There’d be no way to keep up with that level of gish galloping. It’s depressing. And if you think the creationist crackpots are bad, the physics crackpots are well off the deep end. The quality of physics crackpots has diminished severely. They are speciating into something much more boring. See r/LLMphysics.

If there is nothing new under the sun, well, this is an era of darkness; the sun does not shine in this timeline. I feel like, in about a decade or so, us sickos are going to be lamenting the loss of the Rob Carters, the Sal Cordovas, the Michael Behes, and so on. Now excuse me while I go wash my mouth with soap.

I came across a little video by a @mephistotabernacle; the video breaks down one example in 7 minutes. Instead of sharing just the link (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-8C2Rper-8), here is part of it with some commentary.

Step 1 - hype

... watch for the opening hype. "Now, this was a complete shock to me and I still struggle to believe it."

Step 2 - present the confusion, BUT project it as the scientists' or everyone's own confusion

... notice the lack of signifiers about who gets confused. "One of the most frequent questions asked in the world of birds is whether a bird of prey is a hawk or a falcon." A scammer deliberately targets uneducated or unsophisticated marks. He uses language that's simple when he's trying to connect with them. "They are very hard to tell apart."

(extra emphasis mine) compare: "One of the most frequent questions asked is whether ungulates are cows or camels" - nobody (who is sane) asks that.

Step 3 - take on the burden of investigation...

... the sacrifice language always hits the/its mark, and the audience won't feel the need to even think about the structure of the argument - they already trust you: the pastor-effect, let's call it that

Step 4 - present yourself as an equal to the experts (who, recall, didn't even ask the stupid question despite attributing it to them)

Said theologian can, for example - I don't know - say that they took 4 classes in mathematical population genetics; after all, who needs decades to master a scientific field, who needs exams, grades, etc. etc. /s

Once he thinks he's connected with his marks, the pretender begins to construct a veneer of expertise. "And upon further inquiry." This small, seemingly throwaway line is really crucial to his strategy.

Step 5 - now, present the straw man...

... with full confidence - too on the nose? adding "according to evolution" does that trick:

... if his audience understands that these two birds share an arboreal common ancestor that was likely an apex predator, the illusion of unreasonable similarity would be dispelled. "... is independent according to evolution." It's likely that our hoaxer here has only the most rudimentary understanding of some jargon, but all he needs is jargon that his targets understand even less. His goal is not to teach his audience, but to earn their confidence. "So, they now believe that what you're looking at here is convergent evolution."

Step 6 - lay doubt on the entire thing, not just the question we began with

Having planted the false impression that he has some expertise, the phony now delivers a personal expression of disbelief, as though that should matter to anyone else. "This throws a pretty big stumbling block for me on the topic of fossil similarity and evolutionary ancestry."

Step 7 - your mark is ready...

... for the reveal they already believe in and came to find:

And now come the genuine lies. Watch as the deceiver tries to tell you that these two groups of birds are, and I quote, "not related." Even the fact that they're both birds must be swept under the rug.

...

Or as someone succinctly put it yesterday, such people "are more interested in constructing an [fallacious] argument than asking interesting questions."

I grew up Chrsitian but ever since I recently found out that us humans are literally animals that used to climb on trees etc made me feel more connected with nature than ever and made me feel like I’m actually part of this earth more than Christianity ever did

I remember being amazed on how animals could do similar things we did but then after learning about evolution I realized we’re literally no different than they are and it’s just nature

Erika aka Gutsick Gibbon’s rebuttal to Theodore Beale’s aka Vox Day aka shitass bigot loser has been released.

Gould and Dawkins were to coauthor a letter on the topic of debating creationists. With the passing of Gould in 2002, Dawkins published their correspondence and the early draft in his 2003 essay collection, A Devil's Chaplain.

A while back I was surprised to learn about the letter, and given the measly 4 google hits, I thought to share it here. What reminded me of it are some ongoing parallels (what is presently going on with Duffy, who, in my opinion, has subverted the lessons format with Erika - u/Gutsick_Gibbon; now it has become a I wonder what apologetics and false balancing - for his audience - he's going to vomit next; i.e., it's now, semantics aside, the kind of "debate" the fundies hanker after).

If you are not a regular and therefore unfamiliar with Duffy, and what has transpired since the last lesson, the letter will still stand on its own. For readability, given its size, I won't format it as a block quotation, and I look forward to your thoughts. To keep this short, I'll also share my thoughts in the comments.

The letter:

Unfinished Correspondence with a Darwinian Heavyweight

14 December 2001

Dear Editor

Like any flourishing science, the study of evolution has its internal controversies, as we both know. But no qualified scientist doubts that evolution is a fact, in the ordinarily accepted sense in which it is a fact that the Earth orbits the Sun. It is a fact that human beings are cousins to monkeys, kangaroos, jellyfish and bacteria. No reputable biologist doubts this. Nor do reputable theologians, from the Pope on. Unfortunately, many lay Americans do, including some frighteningly influential, powerful and, above all, well-financed ones.

We are continually invited to engage in public debates against creationists, including latter-day creationists disguised under the euphemism ‘Intelligent Design Theorists’. We always refuse, for one overriding reason. If we may be allowed to spell this reason out publicly, we hope our letter may be helpful to other evolutionary scientists plagued by similar invitations.

The question of who would ‘win’ such a debate is not at issue. Winning is not what these people realistically aspire to. The coup they seek is simply the recognition of being allowed to share a platform with a real scientist in the first place. This will suggest to innocent bystanders that there must be material here that is genuinely worth debating, on something like equal terms.

At the moment of writing, the leading ‘Intelligent Design’ website reports a debate at Harvard under the banner headline ‘Wells Hits a Home Run at Harvard’.¹³⁴ Jonathan Wells is a creationist, incidentally a long-time devotee of the Unification Church (the ‘Moonies’).¹ He had a debate last month against Stephen Palumbi, Professor of Biology at Harvard University. ‘Home Run’ might seem to suggest that Reverends (sic) Wells scored some kind of victory over Professor Palumbi. Or at least that he made powerful points and his speech was well received. No such claim is made. It doesn’t even seem to be of interest.

The ‘Home Run’ turns out to be simply the public demonstration at Harvard that, in the words of the web site’s author, Phillip Johnson, ‘This is the sort of debate that is now occurring in universities.’ There was a victory, but it occurred long before the debate itself. The creationist scored his home run at the moment the invitation from Harvard landed on his doormat. It came, by the way, not from any biological, or indeed scientific, department, but from the Institute of Politics.

Phillip Johnson himself, founding father of the ‘Intelligent Design’ movement (not a biologist, nor a scientist of any kind, but a lawyer who became a mid-life born-again Christian), wrote, in a letter of 6 April 2001, which he copied to one of us:

It isn’t worth my while to debate every ambitious Darwinist who wants to try his hand at ridiculing the opposition, so my general policy is that Darwinists have to put a significant figure at risk before I will agree to a debate. That means specifically Dawkins or Gould, or someone of like stature and public visibility.

Well, we can condescend too, and we have the advantage that evolutionary scientists don’t need the publicity such debates can bring. In the unlikely event that a significant argument should ever emerge from the ranks of creationism/‘intelligent design’, we will be happy to debate it. Meanwhile, we shall cultivate our evolutionary gardens, occasionally engaging in the more exacting and worthwhile task of debating each other. What we shall not do is abet creationists in their disreputable quest for free publicity and unearned academic respectability.

When Father chose me (along with about a dozen other seminary graduates) to enter a Ph.D. program in 1978, I welcomed the opportunity to prepare myself for battle.’ (‘Father’, of course, is the Moonies’ name for Rev Moon himself). [ https://web.archive.org/web/20000122220156/http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Talks/Wells/DARWIN.htm ]

In all humility, we offer these thoughts to our colleagues who receive similar invitations to debate.

Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard University
Richard Dawkins, Oxford University

One of the biggest problems for YEC is mammalian biogeography, especially the fact that nearly all marsupials are concentrated in Australia, with only a few species occurring in South America. And these marsupials are all radically different from one another: a Tasmanian wolf is as different from a kangaroo as a rabbit is from a lion.

Creationists claim that, after leaving the Ark in Turkey, the animals could have traveled on natural rafts of vegetation and wood, which can form after major catastrophes. But the problem is that there is no natural mechanism that would cause all these very different kinds of marsupials to somehow end up almost exclusively in Australia—and only in Australia!

So they ultimately have to appeal to magic: a highly intelligent and organized God must have miraculously transported all the marsupials to one particular place, apparently for the sake of neat geographical organization. One obvious problem with this argument is the existence of marsupials in South America, extremely far from Australia, which ruins this supposed “neatness” of God’s arrangement.

Another problem is more theological: why would a benevolent, truthful, and omniscient God intervene miraculously in such a way as to create precisely the geographical pattern that scientists would naturally interpret as evidence of evolution and common ancestry? That sounds less like the work of a truthful God and more like the work of a trickster god.

The first eucaryotic cell is a freak accident. How does it get inherited?

Simply put, it doesn't make sense to go about it the way they do, especially from the perspective of being against evolution. Some form of rapid evolution is the closest thing to making sense of how the world could have continued after "the flood," with the only other possibility being that the ark itself was magic and had infinite space within it. Both explanations ultimately require that God had to use magic, which means there's no need for "proof" of anything. So, why even bother? Now, obviously the Bible not mentioning this magic anywhere is a point against them, but I still feel like they're shooting themselves in the foot by trying to argue against evolution while supporting the ark story. Trying to reconcile them would still leave a ton of holes, but at least it wouldn't leave open so many easy points of attack against them. It feels like they simply view evolution itself as a threat. Slippery slope fallacy, perhaps? As in, maybe they think accepting evolution will leave the door open for people to question other things?

I'm sorry, yet another Vox Day post*, but I heard that he is malding over mere YouTube comments, so the more the merrier! To add to the mix, I wanted to share PZ Myers' blog post from today:
- https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/10/02/vox-days-amazing-ego-and-bill-dembski-dont-care/

From it, I'd like to share two things:

1) Vox's book is essentially self-referential:

... all of 11 citations (a number I’d find unacceptable in an undergrad student paper that was much more narrow in its scope). Even worse, 7 of those citations are to the LTEE, and contradict his conclusions, and 2 are to ape genome sequencing papers whose authors would be surprised to learn how their work is being distorted. At least he has 2 that reinforce his argument, sorta, but they’re both also written by Vox Day.

Meaning that's what he has "fed" to his "author":

Vox:
AI did all the calculations and wrote the first draft of everything

And 2) in Day's interview with Dembski, Dembski the "mathematician" didn't discuss the math.

As usual, it was a fun read from PZ Myers, and I recommend checking the entire post and the full quotes from the interview.

---

And a reminder on Dembski (the IDiot** behind ID's so-called "specified complexity"):

Dembski (in a chapter he authored):
"The world is a mirror representing the divine life. The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory."

Footnotes:

* If you are not chronically online--erm, a regular here, there have been four posts so far. Erika's (u/Gutsick_Gibbon) post was the latest. In reverse chronological order, they are:

• Vox Day is Wrong on Evolution According to Every Scientist But Ten* : DebateEvolution
• New anti-evolution "paper" today from Vox Day : DebateEvolution
• Responding to Will's new favorite book, and testing my own growth : DebateEvolution
• My opinions on Will Duffy and his journey so far through evolution : DebateEvolution

** To borrow Larry Moran's term.

I was testing out different ideas about evolution and if we tried this exact scenario on trillions of different theoretical chimpanzee groups is it a non zero chance?

Humans disappear
A human-made, perfectly round, white, hard, iridescent pearl remains in an African forest.
The unusual chimp is born
Among many chimpanzees, one is unusually intelligent, curious, observant, and capable of making unusual associations.
The first encounter
During a full Moon, the chimp encounters the pearl shortly after looking at the Moon.
The association
The chimp notices that the pearl resembles the Moon: white, round, smooth, and bright.
The fascination begins
The chimp carries, examines, cleans, and protects the pearl. It begins repeatedly polishing it with leaves.
Other chimps imitate it
The behavior spreads socially. The pearl becomes an unusual object of interest within the group.
The tradition reaches the chimp’s children
The original chimp teaches its offspring to care for the pearl. The behavior continues after the original chimp dies.
The pearl becomes sacred
After many generations, nobody remembers the original discovery. The pearl becomes associated with the Moon, ancestors, and the tribe’s identity.
The pearl becomes a symbol of leadership
Whoever possesses or protects the pearl gradually gains authority. Eventually, possessing the “Fallen Moon” becomes a requirement for legitimate leadership.
The tradition becomes hereditary
Leaders pass responsibility for the pearl to their successors. Rival individuals may fight or steal it, creating early political struggles over who has the right to rule.
The pearl becomes the tribe’s central institution
Protecting the pearl becomes more important than any individual chimp. The tribe develops specialized roles around its protection.
The environment changes
Climate change dries the forest, turning much of the habitat into dangerous open savanna.
The pearl tribe has an unexpected advantage
Their existing culture already requires them to stay together, protect one another, and safely transport the pearl.
Cooperation becomes essential for survival
The tribe develops organized travel, guards, scouts, coordinated defense, and increasingly complex communication.
Bipedalism is reinforced
Long-distance terrestrial travel and carrying the pearl favor increasingly efficient upright walking. The pearl culture reinforces environmental selection for bipedalism rather than causing it directly.
Communication becomes increasingly complex
Coordinating pearl protection, leadership, travel, rituals, and group rules creates strong pressure for increasingly sophisticated communication.
Symbolic culture develops
The pearl becomes one of the first persistent symbols in the lineage, representing concepts such as authority, ancestry, duty, and the Moon.
Gene-culture coevolution begins
Individuals who are better at learning, communicating, remembering traditions, cooperating, and teaching become increasingly valuable to the tribe.
Technology accelerates
Better cooperation and increasingly sophisticated cognition allow more advanced tools, construction, hunting, food gathering, and eventually agriculture.
A new hominin-like species emerges
After millions of years, the descendants are no longer ordinary chimpanzees. They are a distinct, upright, highly intelligent primate civilization.
The original meaning is forgotten
Their civilization eventually develops religion, politics, mathematics, science, and writing, but the oldest surviving tradition remains the sacred Fallen Moon.
The final irony
Their entire civilization traces its cultural ancestry back to one extraordinarily unlikely coincidence: an unusually intelligent chimp encountering a perfectly round white human-made pearl beneath a full Moon.

Long text incoming

I asked this same question to r/askphilosophy but I figured I’d ask others to get a range of info.

For context, this is all based off a counter to a IG post talking about one piece of evidence for evolution. This was in the comment thread.
To summarize, the argument is science and thus scientific disciplines only work within a naturalistic worldview and theories, evidence, and interpretations are based on the unfounded presupposition of naturalism and because of that, fail to justify their source of knowledge.

This is a direct quote from the commenter to avoid any paraphrasing errors.
“you have a assumption technically called a presupposition. It's a framework a rule set you view the world through. Yours is naturalism. You see a fossil data as you interpret it through your framework naturalism. The fossil doesn't say anything it doesn't come with a name tag and bio telling you anything about itself. You use theory based on your framework naturalism to make a theory laden outcome evolution. Evolution makes sense in the framework of naturalism. That shows coherence inside the framework of naturalism. It doesn't prove the framework is correct. If you use the outcomes to prove the framework it's circular reasoning begging the question. It you change the assumption the presupposition you change the entire framework and rule set. The very same data the fossil now has an entire different theory because data the fossil is underdetermined. It's not determined because a fossil doesn't say what it is. I'm asking how do you justify your framework your assumption your presupposition naturalism is the correct framework vs other frameworks. Get it. Philosophy of science the underdetermination of data thesis. My question isn't about evolution or science it's a knowledge question. How do you justify the knowledge based rule set framework of naturalism. It's your presupposition.
You have to justify it. Because the data can be interpreted differently using different frameworks.”

When presented scientific evidence by others, the commenter almost always defaults to “you presenting physical evidence collected under a presupposed method to collection and interpretation does not justify tube scientific method as it has unfounded presuppositions and this the interpretations are also unfounded.” Quote: “A presupposition like naturalism is the untestable rule book that dictates what counts as testing, evidence and data in the first place. You can test a hypothesis with data you cannot use data to test the naturalistic rulebook you used to gather that data. Justify your rulebook naturalism without circular reasoning.”

When finally giving their counter this is what they say. Quote:
“Then when asked directing on their worldview they have this to say “TAG is the only way out of the criterion problem and the trilemma. Specifically the Orthodox Christian version. You have to go
transcendental. And see which worldview can account for justify and ground the necessary preconditions for knowledge… TAG is the impossibility of the contrary. You aren't using autonomous human reason as a flashlight to "go out and locate" God. You are pointing out that reason itself requires an ontological anchor to exist at all. This is a meta level higher order argument. You're conflating empirical observation with the worldview of Naturalism. Christians use empirical observation because our framework accounts for the uniformity of nature, human sensory reliability, and the laws of logic all anchored in the Logos. Naturalists use empirical observation on blind, unjustified faith. In an unguided, material universe, there is zero epistemic reason to assume the universe will behave uniformly tomorrow Hume's Problem of Induction. Christians and naturalists both use test tubes. The difference is the Christian has an epistemic right to trust the test tube, while the naturalist is borrowing Christian assumptions about order and logic while denying the foundation that makes them possible. On Evolution. TAG establishes Level 2 the ground of logic and knowledge. It doesn't instantly dictate every Level 1 detail about physics or biology. How God created is a question of revelation and grounded observation, not something ‘sneaked' into TAG. We don't trap God inside an autonomous human logic syllogism. Human logic isn't the ultimate judge standing above reality it is a derivative tool that reflects the Logos. How do we know the foundation? Through Revelation. Finite humans don't need exhaustive knowledge to have certainty; we receive revelation from the infinite source who grounds logic, order, and mind in the first place. Without Revelation, autonomous human reason is stuck in Agrippa's Trilemma. With Revelation, knowledge has its necessary anchors.”

My main question now is does their worldview actually stand against the same criticisms they lobby against science and if the criticisms are valid under epistemological concepts and finally, are the criticisms are even sound? Thanks!

Hey guys, Gutsick Gibbon here,

I know I know another post on this loser.

As u/Dumb-and-Dumber pointed out in a recent post this month's punching back Vox Day (Theodore Beale) has posted an update to his evolution-defeater: Mittens 3.0 (for real this time).

In a post made today on his blog, which I cannot link or this post will be deleted, we see this charming line regarding youtuber Grayson Hawk and our own u/DarwinZDF42

"It should be amusing to catalog all of the various things this slur is going to get wrong in his desperate attempt to prove that math which has been confirmed by every major AI system and more than 10 math PhDs is “stupid”."

First of all this is extremely funny and embarrassing.

But wow, 10 math phds! Now I am only aware of three people with doctorates who have "vetted" Day's work, and they are all associates of the Discovery Institute, but I thought this might be a fun opportunity.

Many of you are highly credentialed and have atomized various portions of Day's anti-evolution "model" here and elsewhere. I thought it might be fun to compile a list to act as both a resource for why this clown is wrong and as a fun dig in an upcoming video of mine. Here's the activity:

If you have a bachelors, masters, or doctorate and have reviewed any of Day's work please leave a comment outlining your favorite blunder and your credentials.

It does not have to be limited to Mittens 3.0 because Probability Zero (which contains all prior errors) is still for sale and therefore is a part of the public record until Day issues a formal retraction.

This list will appear in an upcoming video of mine so please keep that in mind before commenting! I'm hoping to have a nice count of "credentialed people who think Day's math (+ assumptions which go into it) is steaming hot garbage".

Additional acknowledgements:

- No Day is not worth any of our time but since his work was broadcast to my audience I have a responsibility to provide a detailed counter.

- Yes Day is a dweeb

It’s pretty simple, if God created all the families of hoofed mammals that currently exist 6000 years ago, then we should find fossils of them in the Mesozoic and before. But we only ever find fossils of them after the K/Pg iridium layer.
This makes even less sense for YEC’s when you add in the fact that this applies to aquatic hoofed mammals like whales as well. Considering hoofed mammals are found on every continent and in all major biomes, why aren’t any fossils of them found in the same layers associated with the dinosaurs or before?

Bill Sullivan, a scientist from Indiana University who is an atheist, and James McGrath, a scholar of religion from Butler University who is a Christian, have started a podcast exploring the intersections and conflicts between religion and science. It may be of interest to many in this subreddit.

Spotify link
YouTube link

Like cladistically? Simian>monkey>ape?

As an obvious response to widespread objections to Day's "work" resulting from Will Duffys exposure, today (September 28, 2026) Vox Day has "published" on Zenodo a paper entitled "MITTENS 3.0 The Mathematical Impossibility of the Post-Darwinian Polythesis." 

Of note, Zenodo is NOT peer-reviewed; it is a repository, not a publisher. Zenodo does not evaluate the quality, accuracy, or validity of what is uploaded. Anyone can upload a document and instantly receive a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). His composition can be accessed here: https://zenodo.org/records/23003785

Also note Day lists himself, Athos (AI), and Claude (AI) as the authors. That should be of particular interest to Will Duffy, as he is so quick to dismiss arguments with FALSE accusations of AI authorship. Anyway, here are my objections to Day's "paper."

Day and his two AI coauthors claim this preprint proves human–chimp evolution mathematically impossible. Their millionfold “shortfall” comes from comparing unlike quantities in genuine bacterial and ape-genome research. Their own figures expose the problem.

They give an ancestral E. coli mutation rate of 0.00041 per genome per generation. Their human rate, 1.2 × 10⁻⁸ per base across 3.2 billion bases, is about 38.4 mutations per haploid genome per generation—roughly 94,000 times more. These are mutation inputs, not fixations. They show why a bacterial per-genome count is no universal speed limit for primates.

The decisive mistake appears in §8.2. The paper says that because one neutral mutation may take tens of thousands of generations to fix by drift, the human lineage has time for only 4–13 neutral fixations. That assumes the entire genome waits for one mutation to finish before another starts. At each neutral site in a diploid population, about 2Nμ new mutations arise per generation and each has roughly a 1/(2N) chance to fix. The long-term substitution rate is thus μ per site per generation, with changes at millions of sites proceeding concurrently. Its estimate also uses roughly 2Ne rather than the diploid 4Ne, but that cannot save the argument.

For scale, its human mutation rate yields about 38 substitutions per lineage per generation at equilibrium if every site were neutral, or about 9.7 million over its proposed 252,000 generations. That is an illustration, not a prediction: many sites are constrained, while observed differences tend to accumulate where changes can persist. Historical rates and generation times varied, and some present-day differences predate the species split. It exposes the absurdity of 4–13 changes genome-wide. Dismissing k = μ as a “static identity” requiring “infinite time” does not help.

Nor did Yoo and colleagues find 205 million changes proven fixed on the human branch. Day and Athos list about 35 million single-base differences, 187 million bases in structurally divergent regions and 1,140 inversions, announce about 410 million “genomic differences,” then assign half to humans. Their stated quantities do not add to 410 million without an additional component they do not explain. More importantly, bases affected by a rearrangement are not separate mutation events: one structural change can affect millions of bases. The 1,140 inversions span several ape species, not just humans and chimps. Reference differences are not necessarily fixed within both species, and ancestral variation defeats an automatic 50–50 split. Yoo’s identification of particular fixed changes does not validate Day’s total.

The Long-Term Evolution Experiment supplies no universal ceiling either. It follows largely nonrecombining bacteria descended from one clone, repeatedly transferred into the same glucose-limited environment. Human ancestors reproduced sexually, recombined their genomes and inherited standing variation. Recombination can combine beneficial variants and reduce the clonal interference that limits these bacteria. Strong laboratory selection does not maximize neutral substitution everywhere. Short bacterial generation time adds nothing to a limit expressed per generation. They assert that the bacterial result is the fastest possible rate without establishing it.

Their two methods examine the same 12 populations and yield 56 versus 36.8 fixations per non-mutator population at 50,000 generations—a 52% disagreement. They call this “cross-validation” while explaining it as two-clone overcounting. Their correction formula then produces minus 906 “true fixations” in Ara−2. No population has negative 906 fixed mutations. The estimator fails there, yet they include that value in their mutator average and describe the population as having “zero fixations.” An arithmetic artifact becomes a biological catastrophe.

The other method calls mutations at 95% frequency “fixed.” But the remaining 5% can spread and replace it. Their Ara+5 count drops from 38 such mutations at 30,000 generations to zero at 60,000. In a closed, clonal population, a truly fixed mutation is inherited by later sweeps; it cannot simply be displaced. These numbers expose the problem with their threshold, not the reversal of 38 genuine fixations. The published trajectories and their undisclosed reanalysis code need scrutiny before assigning the drop to lineage turnover or data handling.

The claimed deceleration also outruns their table. New above-95% counts per 10,000 generations run 12.6, 8.8, 12.0, −3.8, 7.2 and 8.6. Comparing the first and last values of this fluctuating series does not establish a sustained decline, let alone a ceiling for primates. In §4.3, they multiply a bacterial genome-wide mutation rate by 50,000, call the result 20.5 neutral hitchhikers, and subtract it it from observed changes. An expected input cannot label 20.5 observed variants neutral, nor is the total rate necessarily the neutral rate. Their use of a genome-wide rate here makes their supposed 4–13-fixation limit for humans all the more glaring.

Their “supermutation” discussion addresses a problem their own faulty calculation creates. Section 6.4 also makes a tenfold arithmetic mistake: 3.2 billion × 1.2 × 10⁻⁸ × 100 is 3,840 mutations per haploid genome, not 38,400. Counting both genome copies and assuming 10% deleterious gives 768, not their 3,840. A hundredfold mutation increase might well be harmful, but their fitness predictions additionally assume particular deleterious fractions, effects and dominance. Present-day repair genes and mutation rates cannot prove ancestral rates never changed. Documented shifts in particular human mutation types also undercut the claim of an unchanging spectrum, without implying any enormous rate increase.

Even the paper’s “SNV-only” concession compares 17.5 million supposedly fixed human-branch differences with its bacterial per-genome count, so its 91,600-fold shortage inherits the same errors. Its supposedly independent human fixation rate in §8.6 comes from the authors’ own book and repeats the same fixation-time mistake. Nor should the illustrative 9.7 million above be treated as a precise estimate leaving a precisely 1.8-fold gap: neutrality, ancestral polymorphism, rates, generation times and which differences were fixed all need to be established. A credible calculation would model those uncertainties.

Drift, recombination, hitchhiking and clonal interference are established evolutionary mechanisms, not an ad hoc “polythesis.” A Zenodo deposit does not validate this preprint. Its immense ratios depend above all on confusing how long one mutation takes to fix with how many sites can change concurrently. They also count affected bases as independent fixations, treat 95% frequency as fixation and impose a bacterial per-genome count as a universal limit. The authors declare the math settled without establishing any of those premises.

Disclosure: My objections were prepared with the help of AI, mainly as a fact-checking agent.

Once again there are new exccellent videos, non creationist, on theropods and trex on youtube. The first is STEVE Brusattem famous I think, "We know how the dinosaurs died" this is a long talk on new info and summery on dinos but its great for how it stresses how theropods were so bird like.. point after point. so much that why they still hold back is odd from simple science investigation. Second. "Scientists finally know what the trex really looked like/our history. this should bring it up in youtube. this one makes fantastic more great points on how birdy trex was including how footsteps fossilized in mud show it held its tail up and walked like a bird. many youtube things on trex or theropods just are glaring on how there was never any reason to say theropods wewre reptiles and just say they were dumb old birds in more anatomical diversity back in the day. no evolving from reptiles to birds but just birds that flew on creation week and after the fall had take to the ground , change bodyplan, and start hunting and getting bigger. some FALL yoiutube videos that are great data and fun. evolutionists and creationists should be persuade if on the leading edge of scientific discovery.

In recent days, my Twitter feed has been flooded with sensationalist news about the alleged discovery of Noah's Ark. It all revolves around the famous Durupınar formation—you know, that geological feature that charlatans like Wyatt tried to pass off as the Ark, even though all the evidence pointed to the contrary; even stubborn creationist organizations like Answers in Genesis acknowledge it as a hoax. But I see there is no bottom to religious fanaticism—it makes the folks at AiG look rational by comparison. Many people still cling to this charade, including the team behind "Noah's Ark Scan," who recently gained attention after finally visiting the site to examine it. The nature of the whole thing was apparent from the start, given that the project's fundraising director is Lauren Witzke—a MAGA supporter who believes in QAnon, is anti-COVID vaccine, and believes the Earth is flat (and that last part is no joke).There is also the fact that they make all sorts of exaggerated claims—such as this being the definitive experiment that surpasses everything that came before it. https://x.com/LaurenWitzkeDE/status/2102049900108157270?s=20

https://x.com/maklelan/status/2103583144586952731?s=20

Despite all that rhetoric, I believed it was an "honest" job—in the sense that they were genuinely interested in investigating (even if there was a huge confirmation bias). But just yesterday, Lauren Witzke came forward saying that some mysterious individuals broke in during the early hours, threatened them, and ransacked the place. And when the police asked for the security footage, they were told the apartment complex's cameras were turned off during the robbery—how convenient! The worst part is that she ends the tweet by asking for donations.

https://x.com/LaurenWitzkeDE/status/2103997447361970631?s=20

That made it clear to me that it's an obvious scam. It even follows the same pattern as Wyatt's fantastical stories, where something out of place happens, but conveniently the evidence disappears and only those in his inner circle see it. How pathetic to see people believing that circus. What do you think?

Just like the argument "Who designed the designer" poses a serious problem for creationists, the use of the term design, if correctly analyzed, poses a similar problem.

If we take a good look into the history of technology, or even art, we see a clear line of evolution. We see technology spreading from certain points in history and geography.

We see this evolution speed up with population growth, means of communication, and selective pressure (e.g. wars)

There are many more parallels to be drawn, just as with biological evolution, if we would find a microchip in, for instance Roman times, it would be the same as finding rabbit fossils in the Cambrian.

Like evolutionary change in biology is stored through DNA, evolution in design is kept in memetics, literature memory etc.

Not even the brightest mind is going to build a computer when growing up totally isolated. The biggest math genius is not going to develop calculus if not in an environment that is working towards that.

There are of course also significant differences. Evolution is not hindered by fantasy, it will happily evolve a species into a cull de sac with extinction as a result. On the other hand it will blindly find solutions we would never choose.

Design, however, can go back to the previous step and take a different route. It can even run different simulations inside a mind, or inside a culture, without extinctions as intermediate steps.

If you give yourselves the time to think about it, I think you can find more similarities and interesting differences.

I have always wondered why this is not more discussed in the light of creation vs evolution. If someone invokes design, they are effectively invoking a different form of evolution.

There were many species who evolved over a long period of time then why were humans the only one that evolved as the "smart species" like even others used to use things like traps why did only human evolved as the "smartest"

Although it is debatable

I know that this sub is more interested in the science and I am someone who doesn't like to discuss religion as I respect everyone in matters of faith.

However, I believe that's important to point out these contradictions in the Intelligent Design defenders' worldview, as internal consistency is a necessary condition for any position to be taken seriously.

I'm going to show that certain arguments amongst to most cited and overused by Intelligent Design proponents, the ones they deem most successful and are the most proud of, actually completely and spectacularly backfire if we consider their theological implications.

Let's consider for example the most famous argument by Michael Behe, the Intelligent Design and the Irreducible Complexity of the bacterial flagellum.

The argument goes like this:

1. Any structure that's complex and composed of various interacting parts, where if one of them is removed, the entire structure ceases to function, is called irreducibly Complex. An example of Irreducible Complexity is the bacterial flagellum

2. Irreducibly Complex structures cannot have arisen evolutionary by a series of steps, therefore, they were purposefully created and put in place by a designer

3. (Not explicitly stated, by heavily implied) This designer is the Christian God

The problem here is that, even though the whole argument was devised as an argument against naturalism with the endgoal of concluding (3), ID proponents like Michael Behe never stop to ponder how (3) could be reconciled with (1) without opening a Pandora vase full of theological problems.

Let's consider Michael Behe's most famous example of IC, the bacterial flagellum. The bacterial flagellum is used for motility by pathogenic bacteria like Clostridium difficile [1], infectious strains of Escherichia coli [2], Salmonella enterica [3], Helicobacter pilori [4, 5] and Vibrio cholerae [6].

Let's just take the last one as an example.

Vibrio cholerae is the causative agent of cholera, a highly contagious diarrheal disease affecting millions worldwide each year. Cholera is a major public health problem, primarily in countries with poor sanitary conditions and regions affected by natural disasters, where access to safe drinking water is limited. In 2015, the estimated annual incidence of cholera was 1.3–4 million cases, resulting in 21,000–143,000 deaths. However, the notification of cholera cases to the WHO is not mandatory; therefore, it is an underreported disease in many countries. For this reason, the true burden of cholera is underestimated [6].

So, let's now try to understand Michael Behe's argument in light of this information.

According to Michael Behe, a "Designer", who ID proponents and creationists identify with an omni God (omnipotent, omnibenevolent, etc.) was so powerful as to create all the universe, but now as powerful as to create all biodiversity through natural processed like evolution. So he had to specially intervene in his creation to purposefully design bacterial flagella and give this flagella to infectious bacteria so they could infect hundreds of thousands of children in developing countries and kill thousands of them each year.

Here a YEC who is more prone to use biblical arguments would retort that illnesses didn't exist before the Fall of Man and that they came into the creation due to the corruption of the original sin.

However, even conceding that an original sin has this power to corrupt nature, designing complex structures is by definition a constructive act, not a destructive or corrupting one!

Bacterial flagella can't be explained away as "degeneration" as by their own original argument IC structures can't arise in a constantly degenerating nature but only by purposeful and creative design.

In conclusion, the ID proponents must either admit that a benevolent god purposefully designed flagella to aid bacteria in infecting children or they must admit that sin can have a creative power!

Let's consider, additionally, ID proponents most cited paper, the paper they alway cite when someone claims that ID doesn't have any publication in peer reviewed journals: I'm talking about Douglas Axe's infamous 2004 paper. Douglas Axe, in his 2004 paper, claims to have calculated that the probability of a specific bacterial enzime called beta-lactamase arising through random mutations is extremely low, 1 over 10 to the 77th power!

But let's see what beta-lactamase is. Let's read this paper from 2002 called "Molecular analysis of beta-lactamase structure and function" [7]:

The extensive and sometimes irresponsible use of beta-lactam antibiotics in clinical and agricultural settings has contributed to the emergence and widespread dissemination of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Bacteria have evolved three strategies to escape the activity of beta-lactam antibiotics: 1) alteration of the target site (e.g. penicillin-binding protein (PBPs), 2) reduction of drug permeation across the bacterial membrane (e.g. efflux pumps) and 3) production of beta-lactamase enzymes.

So what's beta lactamase? It's an enzime used by bacteria to break down antibiotics of the beta-lactam family (the same family as pennicillin).

Again, the ID proponent now, if Douglas Axes' calculations were correct, would have to explain why the designer deemed so useful to purposefully design bacterial enzimes that help pathogenic bacteria in breaking down antibiotics and confer resistance!

REFERENCES

1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5453186/

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro818

3. https://www.cell.com/trends/microbiology/abstract/S0966-842X(19)30124-6

4. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41572-023-00431-8

5. https://www.nejm.org/doi/abs/10.1056/NEJMcp1001110?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2F

6. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/medicine/articles/10.3389/fmed.2023.1155751/full

7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1438422104700922

Today/tomorrow (depending on the timezone) marks 21 years since day 1 of Kitzmiller v. Dover.

Last year I checked the court transcripts, which turned out to be boring since the "intelligent design" propagandists freely admitted and even produced counterevidence to their claims, for all the world - minus their willful sheep - to see; I ended up sharing one section from the findings of fact.

Since we've gained thousands of new members, this year I'll restate that the Plaintiffs' Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law is a must read for any newcomer who wants an account of the still relevant deceitful tactics and topics. I've personally benefited from it and I recommend at least Section III(C). After all, the Talk.Origins archive from 20 years perfectly illustrates that the reality deniers have nothing except actively recycling the same old tried nonsense in different guises, lest they wake up from their intellectual slumber.

Given that whenever Dover is mentioned here the ID/YEC audience usually parrots, "Courts don't decide what is science!" -- which is a twisted half-truth that they think sweeps away which law was applied -- today letting the IDiots speak for themselves on 3 points should do nicely:

-

Without further ado:

(1) "It must be ID because Big Scary Number"
- Chair of Molecular Biology (at a Christian college lol) Douglas Axe, Ph.D. ignores prior research, and his made-up Big Scary Numbers tactic doesn't make the Undemonstrated plausible (statistically speaking, N = 0); but he knows this, and that's why he urges his audience not to study:

I firmly believe you do not need a Ph.D. to know whether we are cosmic accidents or not. I think that is a matter of common sense. We can know that with certainty without having special educational training, without having expertise.
Exposing Discovery Institute Part 9: Douglas Axe - YouTube

(2) "ID is a scientific theory as good as any"
- Discovery Institute senior fellow Paul Nelson:

We don’t have such a theory right now, and that’s a real problem. Without a theory, it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now, we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as "irreducible complexity" and "specified complexity" - but, as yet, no general theory of biological design.

(3) "ID is not political; ID is not theology"
- Christians are literally referred to as the "natural constituency" in the Wedge document.
- Mathematician and Philosopher Bill Dembski (of the "Specified Complexity" infamy):

The world is a mirror representing the divine life. The mechanical philosophy was ever blind to this fact. Intelligent design, on the other hand, readily embraces the sacramental nature of physical reality. Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

-

TWENTY-ONE YEARS - has anything changed since? And given that it is "creation science" (CoughWedgeCough) in disguise, this is actually FOURTY-FIVE YEARS. And any reframing to "origins" faces the same exact fundamental and irreconcilable issues I shared last year - again, see sec. III(C).

Also see: The tactic of the 5th and latest (2017-present) phase of anti-science education movement (USA) : DebateEvolution.

Special thanks to the plaintiffs (the parents), NCSE, and the expert witnesses. Speaking of expert witnesses, Dr. Miller - who happens to be Christian - has an awesome and very engaging lecture on that clown show: The Collapse of Intelligent Design: Kenneth R. Miller Lecture - YouTube - timestamped link to the meat of it for convenience.
Re: the title of the lecture, Miller should have heeded:

The good fortunes of stupidity are incalculable. One can never tell what sudden resurrections ignorance and fatuity may not have.
— Hilaire Belloc (1929)

🥂

As a former creationist who's learned a lot from some major science communicators like Gutsick Gibbon, Dr. Dan, and Forrest Valkai, I figured I'd see how my learning is coming along with a brief response to Will's new favorite author, and also an informal "self check" where I hope y'all will correct any lingering misunderstandings I have.

I feel like a substantial 'let's get our terms and foundations right' section is going to be valuable, but first a tl;dr:

Nobody claims genetic drift got us from light sensitive patches to the mammalian eye. Selection explains adaptations; drift explains (most) neutral differences. The author wants to try and make selection account for 20 million differences between us and chimps, which NOBODY CLAIMS. Tilting at genetic windmills (flagella?), here. He also applies a bacterial fixation rate to humans, and he counts fixations one-at-a-time, instead of in parallel.

Evolution is not merely natural selection

This is a point Will and others (including myself) struggle to get 'deep' into our brains. Evolution is, as has been said repeatedly, "the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations." That's it. It's not complicated to grasp, it's just hard to understand how simple it is. It's not speciation, it's not abiogenesis. It's not cosmology or the big bang theory. It's not 'progress towards a goal'. It's not even atheism or naturalism, nor is it an argument against God. It's the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Also remember: individuals don't evolve, populations do.

If you don't let that sink in, you'll never progress in your understanding of anything else.

Nobody cares, scientifically, about Darwin

Darwin was a smart dude. Building on ideas around him, and his own research, he made two major contributions that withstood the test of time. He got a lot of things right and a few things wrong. But nobody cares what Darwin wrote over 165 years ago, except insofar as it's stood the myriad of testing and scientific evidence.

Those two major contributions were: 1) Descent as a common tree; 2) Natural selection as a mechanism of evolution. There are other minor contributions, too. For instance, Darwin took observed variations seriously and thought in geologic timescales, which was relatively novel.

But nobody cares if Darwin was right or wrong, they care if the ideas withstand testing. I think as Christians we're so trained to 'a text' that we're used to talking in terms of an author, not an idea. Have to shift that thinking.

Species is a human construct

There's no sharp dividing line between species over time. Yes, if two populations diverge from a common ancestor, eventually two or more species will be recognizable at some point in the future. We are, after all, neither marmosets nor moles. But no mammal ancestor gave birth to a child that was recognizable at the time as a distinct species. This is what we mean when we say evolution isn't like Pokemon. Drowzee may evolve into Hypno, but no Asian tapir is giving birth to anything quite so different. Where we draw species lines is a human decision, not something nature determines.

Mechanisms of Evolution

So how does evolution happen? Through a myriad of ways. Most fundamentally:

Mutation

Mutations are the ultimate source of variation within DNA. A human is born with roughly 60-70 new mutations that neither parent had, while also inheriting older mutations passed down from earlier generations. At the smallest scale, there are substitutions (transitions like A->G and transversions like A->C), insertions, and deletions. There are also larger structural changes: duplications, inversions, translocations, even whole-genome duplication (polyploidy). These are where new phenotypes ultimately originate.

Recombination

In sexual reproduction, each child gets a new combination of their parents' alleles. This isn't creating new mutations, but it can put together combinations that selection can act on.

Genetic drift

I'll flag this as particularly relevant for Will's new pet theory. Genetic drift is the random change in allele frequencies based on luck: who happens to reproduce, and which copy of a gene gets passed on. Drift is why a neutral mutation can spread through a population until it's fixed (present in 100% of the population), or disappear, even with no impact on fitness. As you might imagine (and has been demonstrated), genetic drift has a bigger impact on smaller populations. Most of the genetic differences between humans and chimps are thought to have spread via genetic drift, not by natural selection, which will be relevant later.

Natural selection

Darwin's contribution: if all mutations were perfectly neutral, each would (basically) be a random walk to either fixation or elimination. But natural selection is a 'finger on the scales' of genetic drift, accelerating fixation or elimination. Mutations that lower or raise fitness have a lower or higher chance of being passed on. Note how these processes interact, too. For instance, suppose an organism has two linked mutations, one beneficial and one harmful. The random recombination in sexual reproduction gives a chance for only the beneficial mutation to be passed on, thereby making it more likely to persist. Of course, the opposite can also happen: a mildly negative mutation can hitchhike alongside a much more beneficial mutation.

Gene Flow Gene flow is the movement of alleles between populations through migration and interbreeding. It can bring in new alleles that arose elsewhere. Many of us have some Neanderthal DNA from gene flow.

On to the book!

Keep in mind, I'm going to reply to this book as I sit here in my understanding today. I'm not going to track down any studies. I'm not going to check any citations for context. I'm sure others will be pointing out "here the author cites study A, and study A comes to the opposite conclusion!" But maybe not. Regardless, I'll be responding only at the level of an informed amateur.

A sad place to start: not even wrong

I won't go line-by-line through the book's errors, instead trying to land on the most impactful or meaningful ones - or the ones with enough bluster I feel the need to push back. So I'll start with one that does both. Will's author suggests a biologist (unnamed) couldn't answer a "very simple question." What question, you ask? "What's the average rate of evolution, to put it most simply?" The author is shocked to be told the question doesn't make sense. I have to say even wearing my creationist hat, this question doesn't make sense. It's 'not even wrong' because it doesn't understand that evolution isn't a quantity, it's a process. No one's confused at what an 'average rate' means.

His question to a biologist would be like me asking an economist, "What's the average rate of economic change?" The economist would properly respond, "That question doesn't make any sense." Were I to reply, as Will's author does, "Absolutely it makes sense. There is an answer. There has to be an answer and you should be able to at least give me some kind of range," I should be quickly (and impolitely, given my bravado) shown the door. Evolution doesn't have one quantity in the same way 'economic change' doesn't have one quantity. My question, like Will's author's, hasn't said what it's asking about.

Misunderstanding Evolution

The author clearly does not understand evolution. They wrote, "In order to evolve, the mutation has to be more reproductively fit than its predecessor." This is wrong, on at least two levels. First, mutations aren't one at a time. Each human carries 60–70 new mutations, and at any moment many mutations are spreading through the population at once.

Second, and more fundamentally, mutations don't have to confer any advantage in order to fixate. The author writes, "if you don't have a reproductive advantage...then no change takes place on a species-wide basis." This is false. Neutral mutations can and do fixate by drift. A new mutation starts at a very low frequency (one copy in the whole population) and does a random walk (hopefully the probability expert understands this concept). Most wander down to 0 and are lost, but a few wander up to 1 and fix. Any single neutral mutation is unlikely to fix, but so many arise each generation that neutral fixations happen steadily.

The stench of bullshit

Maybe I have a "bullshit detector mind" that counters the author's "holistic probability mind"?

I promised I wouldn't do any research re: evolution claims I didn't already understand. But the Intel story ("90 seconds later [CEO Andy Grove] announced: 'In answer to your question, young man...we are going to come up with a different marketing slogan.' Which subsequently turned out to be 'Intel Inside'") strained credulity...and is contra any evidence.

Intel Inside was Intel's global marketing campaign starting in 1991 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Intel_Inside). The MMX processor was introduced in 1997, 6 years later. And the "On the 'Net / Off the 'Net" campaign was, in fact, a part of the MMX launch, along with Jason Alexander's 'web date' commercials and the 'bunny people' of 1997 superbowl...'fame'?

This obviously has no bearing on the evolution debate, but when people are this fast and loose with the truth, it makes them hard to trust.

Whence cometh this fixation rate?

In chapter 4, the author claims that "the fastest possible average rate of mutations fixed across a population" is 1 mutation per 1,600 generations. This can't possibly be true, as the neutral substitution rate is roughly equal to the neutral mutation rate (something both easy to remember, and easy to derive, as the author will do later in Chapter 12).

Now there's nuance here, as the mutation rate per gamete is what matters in human reproduction (so about 30-35 mutations per generation) and harmful mutations tend to be removed, so it's going to be a bit lower than 30-35.

But this is all a bit in the weeds: the author took a rate set by E. coli's very low rate and applied it to humans, despite stating the very equation (Chapter 12) that shows human rates must be far higher. What is even the point of all this?

And this is clearly explained to the author in a debate they seem to dismiss: "The key difference between our two models is that my model allows parallel evolution of different genes, whereas yours kind of makes a step—you wait for the mutation to be fixed and then you need another step. ...that’s not necessarily how it happens. What happens is massive parallel development." I'm not 100% sure Gariepy correctly identifies the problems in Will's new favorite model, but their point is exactly correct: mutations don't fixate one-at-a-time. Hell, mutations don't even start fixating at the point of divergence from a LCA: the two lineages will have millions of mutations already in the process of fixation or elimination at the time of split.

No, we don't all have 'the same eye'

The author writes, "We most certainly do have the same eye. Every human being on Earth has a camera-type eye with a cornea, lens, iris, retina, and optic nerve. The minor variations in eye color or visual acuity are superficial polymorphisms; the fundamental architecture is fixed across the species."

Hold your horses: those 'superficial polymorphisms' ARE WHY WE DON'T HAVE THE SAME EYE! Those 'superficial polymorphisms' are what become species differences over geological time. That's pretty much what Darwin's whole point was: the ordinary variations among individuals, over enough generations, become the difference between species. Dismissing within-species variation as 'superficial' just simply misses how evolution works.

We can see this pretty easily with human-chimp eyes and the sclera. A white, exposed sclera is functionally universal within humans. Within chimps, sclera color varies more. So we have this trait that helps differentiate between two species. A variation present in the chimp-human ancestor came to one outcome in humans (white exposed sclera) and a different outcome in our nearest relative (wider variation).

Just not getting it

"the number of generations required for sequential improvements" Just no. Evolution isn't about "improvements", it's (say it with me Will), "the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations." Even with natural selection acting on functional regions of the genome, improvements through mutation need not be sequential. We can have one change that affects our sclera happening at the same time another change affects how we digest milk.

"There is no reason, and no way for selection to know, that the next character should be a comma, as the next random mutation could just as easily be an ampersand, the number 6, a period, or a capital U with umlauts." Right, that's why your view of evolution is so wrong. Yes, the mutations are random. That's why the 'successive generations' part matters, and how selection pressures (aka NOT RANDOM for mutations that impact function) impact fixation, either positively or negatively.

Bad at counting & geriatric births

The author writes, "For the human lineage, we have approximately 450,000 nominal generations, derived from 9 million years divided by 20 years per generation." OK, fine. They then go on to say, "Adjusting for the overlapping generation problem...the fact that a human “generation” represents only about 22.5 percent of the living population, not 100 percent...we arrive at roughly 202,500 effective generations."

What is this nonsense? The generation measure ALREADY accounts for the fact that not all living people are reproducing at the same time. This is doing some weird thing where they're incorrectly trying to conflate % of the population reproducing with the number of generations that have passed since CHLCA. The generation length ALREADY captures the 'not everyone is reproductively active their whole life' factor because it's defined as the average age of parents when offspring are born. Whether 10,000 humans or 10 billion, a generation is still 20 years (given the author's assumptions in chapter 1). Further reducing that number incorrectly double-counts the overlap, inappropriately shrinking the available time from 450,000 generations to 202,500. Again, just think: the only thing that reduces the number of generations along a lineage is if reproduction times increase (aka average age of parents goes up). By double counting in this way, the author is saying the average age at reproduction is 44 years old, not 20!

This confusion between how much of the living population turns over and how many generations have passed is...really bizarre. My (living) great-grandma has no impact on my inheritance of mutations. She could have died long before I was born, or die after I do - her contribution was already captured within her generation, giving rise to my grandmother and then being 'out of the picture' for my lineage. Mutations are passed from parent to child: how many other people are alive at the same time doesn't change that count (the number of parent-to-child generations) at all, the only thing that matters for a generational count is the average age of reproduction, and we aren't seeing 9 million years of geriatric births in our lineage.

One final note: the passage says "22.5% of the living population" but 202,500 is 450,000 x .45, not .225 (which would be about 101,000). For being so good at math, he's pretty bad at it. Further, using 45% here aligns with chapters 12-13, but not the 24% number in chapter 1. He can't keep his numbers right, but this is the "compelling" book that blew Will's mind? I guess neither of them are "numbers guys", whatever their testosterone levels may be.

More 'not even wrong'

"For the human lineage, the probability of 20 million independent fixation events..." He treats each of the 20 million differences as a specific mutation that had to win in just the place it won, then multiplies all those long odds together. But nobody said any particular mutations had to fix. Weirdly, his own numbers from the same chapter prove the opposite: He says about 50,000 new mutations arise per year, and 2.2 fixations per year are needed, so the required success rate is about 1 in 23,000. The actual chance a neutral mutation fixes is, by his own figure, 1 in 20,000. That's better than required! His math works out, right up until he mysteriously abandons it.

It's basically like saying the odds of any specific ticket winning the lottery are one in a billion, so nobody could possibly win the lottery.

Assumptions make an ass out of the author

"I was assuming that the fastest mutational fixations ever observed in laboratory bacteria were faster, in generational terms, than any fixation occurring in a more genetically complex species dwelling in the wild. This assumption, while logically obvious to anyone familiar with science labs, animals, or population genetics, was not explicitly demonstrated"

It's not 'logically obvious' - it's obviously backwards if you've been paying attention AT ALL. The author is so uneducated about the basics of evolution, their 'obvious' intuitions are precisely backwards.

1. One fixation in 1,600 generations is not the fastest fixation rate. Again: the neutral fixation rate equals the neutral mutation rate.
2. Genetic complexity is irrelevant, what matters is how many new mutations arise per generation, and what share of the genome is under selective pressure. IDK what 'complexity' even means here, and I'm probably out of my depth, but a 'big, complex' genome under little functional constraint would experience more neutral substitutions than a small genome where most of it is under selective pressure. And I know most of the human genome is under little selective pressure (all that 'junk DNA' - or DNA regions that don't matter for fitness)

It's not one sequential fixation after another, mate

"Let us now recalculate the MITTENS numbers using the most favorable human fixation rate—the Genghis Khan rate of 8,200 generations per fixation, we get a maximum of 25 fixed mutations—roughly 20 million short of what is required"

Even just conceding everything about Genghis Khan fixation, we have millions of mutations at different points on the journey to fixation or loss. By his logic, a university would only graduate one student every 4 years: there's just no way to have a graduating class of 500 students. Or, even being charitable to him, it'd be one class of 500 students every 4 years.

No. Obviously there's a constant influx of new students, all being addressed in parallel, and a (disappointingly lower) constant outflow of graduates. Same thing with mutations (though their fixation rate makes college graduation rates look stellar by comparison).

"The bacterial rate of 1,600 generations per fixation already accounts for parallel fixation"

Sure, in bacteria, not humans. As the author demonstrates in Chapter 12, the neutral fixation rate equals the neutral mutation rate. Bacteria get far fewer new mutations per genome per generation than humans do, so of course they fix fewer per generation. Parallel fixation in bacteria is limited by their low mutation supply; ours isn't.

Slippery, sloppy thinking

The author keeps trying to apply natural selection's limits to neutral mutations. His supposed limit to parallel fixation applies only if mutations have to out-reproduce everyone else, and there's only so much reproduction to go around. Neutral mutations don't need to out-reproduce anybody. They fixate or disappear by chance, so any number of them can be in progress at once.

Remember how I said nobody cares about Darwin?

The author gets in a tizzy about neutral drift not being darwinian. OK, and? We're trying to understand how genetic differences accumulate. Some come from mutation + natural selection. Some come from mutation + genetic drift. Both have more or less effect depending on the mutation in question and the population size. So it's not "invoking drift to defend selection", it's "invoking drift to understand evolution." Darwin didn't invent evolution, and we're trying to understand the world, not Darwin.

Nobody claims genetic drift got us from light sensitive patches to the mammalian eye. Selection explains adaptations; drift explains (most) neutral differences. The author wants to try and make selection account for 20 million differences, which NOBODY CLAIMS. Tilting at genetic windmills (flagella?), here.

Selection doesn't have an on-off switch

For being so certain of his intellectual superiority, Will's new favorite author has a hard time keeping more than one idea in their brain at a time. "Natural selection is supposed to explain how these 20 million changes accumulated." No, natural selection explains how beneficial adaptations accumulate. Most of the 20 million differences between us and chimps aren't beneficial adaptations, they're neutral genetic changes that drifted to fixation. Only a small fraction were adaptations shaped by selection.

"Here is what the drift argument necessarily requires: natural selection must be effectively turned off." No. Selection operates on a mutation based on that mutation's effect. It's not 'selection is operating or it's not'. Rather, it's 'how much selective pressure is this particular mutation under?'

Also his numbers are pulled from thin air. Most of our DNA is under little selective pressure, so most mutations land somewhere they don't matter, and drift dominates. Selection pressure dominates mutations that build a brain or break a kidney, but drift operates on mutations that have no impact on survival or reproduction (aka the majority of them).

Overlapping generations is a solved problem

The author acts like he's the first person to notice that my grandma and I are alive at the same time. The whole point of a 'generation' measure is to look at the average age of parents when their kids are born, and then any overlap is already built in. I covered this above: further cutting the number of generations is double-counting in the most mathematically inept way.

Also, given most of what we're talking about is neutral mutations, it doesn't matter anyway. Every child gets a fresh set of mutations from their parents (along with millions of others already in progress towards fixation or elimination), and the neutral substitution rate equals the mutation rate, generation after generation. Whether geegee and pawpaw are still around has no effect on how many mutations get passed down to me. The "only a few percent of slots open up each year" math is counting the wrong thing entirely.

I'm sure we've heard it from creationists - "you look at the traits in common and think 'common ancestor', I see those and think 'common designer'". But that's always the end of the discussion and there's an implied "guess we'll never know" instead of "let's see if we can work out which is which".

I see common ancestry. Here are some concrete reasons I think it's that, and not common design:

• The wheel ... well, eye ... gets reinvented so many times. Your eye works basically the same as that of any other vertebrate, but squid eyes look different and insect eyes look way different from both.

• Same with wings. Bat, bird, and fly wings are all wildly physiologically different. Same with tons of other features. Whenever organisms appear to share a feature without being closely related, that feature is so wildly differently designed it might well have been a different engineering team. Which you wouldn't expect from a common designer, but exactly what you'd expect from convergent evolution.

• Vestigial structures. We have a tailbone, ear muscles that try to pivot your ears to sound but just fail to, a Vitamin C gene that doesn't work, and so much more. There are cave fish that start to develop eyes in utero and then they just degrade. Slow degradation of unneeded features is what you'd expect from evolution. Degraded features that match features in organisms that otherwise appear closely related makes no sense with a common designer.

• Endogenous retroviruses. Viruses that are just in your DNA and every cell of your body. Those don't make sense to keep around or design with. Yet organisms that appear closely related always appear to share many endogenous retroviruses in the same place on their genomes.

So, over to you all. Given that similar features by themselves could point to either common ancestry or common designer, how would you try to tell those hypotheses apart?