Let's suppose a young earth and take a species we have today...a rabbit and we let it microevolve over a billion years, would it not look drastically different than it does today? Or what biological mechanism can you point out that would prevent this species from having offshoots that eventually increase in size or decrease in size, or get bigger ears or smaller ears, or a mixture of these microevolution events snowballing into something we wouldn't call a rabbit anymore?

If evolution were to be overtuned, it would be a monumental paradigm shift. Big paradigm shifts don't come very often in Science. I was pointing this out in a comment here, that there really haven't been that many major paradigm shifts in science, and every scientists wants to be the next person to do it, to rewrite the field (as that would win them a nobel prize).

And the number of major paradigm shifts that happened in science...well...my ballpark estimate was "between 10 and 100". But I wanted to actually try to count this number, taking advantage of various wikipedia articles, and partially just working from memory--I imagine I still missed a couple, but figured I'd share my list anyway.

These are roughly chronologically ordered. But perfect chronological ordering is pretty hard to do here--some ideas were developed over a century, or proposed early but not widely accepted until 30 years later. I generally went by "when was the theory accepted".

Obviously skipping some small stuff, and lumping some major ideas that were developed in stages under a single bullet point.

16th century

• Heliocentric model (the earth orbits the sun)

17th century

• Newtonian Mechanics (objects in motion stay in motion, for every action there is an equivalent reaction)
• Theory of Gravity (mass attracts mass)

18th century

• Linnean Taxonomy (A major observation that life consistently clumps into nested hierarchies. This was unexpected based on the dominant model at the time--creationism--although the explanation for these nested hierarchies would take over a hundred years).
• Kinetic theory of gases (gases are like billiard balls bouncing against the walls of the gas chamber, and temperature is how fast they are going)
• Geology (formal classification and mapping of rocks was created, and much older ages of the earth were proposed).

19th century

• Atomic Theory (the same ratios of two substances are needed for reactions, and excess of either is not used)
• Molecular Theory (molecules are made out of atoms)
• Cell Theory (Living stuff is made out of cells)
• Germ Theory (Diseases are spread by germs--"germ" here referring to a range of pathogens including viruses, bacteria, fungi, prions, viroids)
• Theory of Evolution (All life on earth can trace ancestry back to "one or a few" common ancestors as finally an explanation for the nested hierarchies observed in Linnean Taxonomy--note that the choice between "one or a few" would not be conclusively resolved for another 150 years. Also, yes, I'm aware that the modern definition of Evolution is "change in allele frequency over time", sticking to what Darwin wrote for the 19th century bullet point. Darwin didn't know what an allele was).
• Electromagnetism (the fact that electricity and magnetism are the same force, and that light is an electromagnetic wave)
• Global Warming (This one is quite spread out--research here started around 1820, by the end of the 19th century we knew CO2 trapped heat, and didn't easily leave the atmosphere, and that human activity could raise global CO2 and thus global temperatures, although it wouldn't be till the 1930s that we confirmed global temperatures were already rising)

20th century

• Special Relativity (nothing moves faster than the speed of light, light moves the same speed regardless of your speed, time slows down for fast moving objects and they get heavier)
• General Relativity (gravity bends spacetime itself, including light. If you are in a gravitational field, time moves slower)
• Collision Theory (chemical reactions are produced by molecules moving at each other with the right orientation and energy)
• Particulate Inheritance (Mendelian inheritance was technically found by Mendel in the 19th century, but not re-discovered with widespread references in Biological papers until the early 20th century)
• Lewis acids and bases+Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory (explanation of acids and bases as donating/receiving electrons or protons--"donating protons" here referring to donating the nucleus of a hydrogen atom to a different molecule)
• Quantum Mechanics (fundamental particles can only be in fixed energy states, and small objects behave like waves)
• Valence Bond Theory+Molecular Orbital Theory (An effort to use the new field of quantum mechanics to predict the shape and bonding tendencies of molecules)
• Transition state theory (calculating the estimated energy required to start a chemical reaction)
• Dynamo Theory (the explanation for why earth continues to have a magnetic field, and the study of the history of earth's magnetic field based on magnetic orientations in rocks)
• Ediacaran Biota (A major requirement of evolution--Darwin himself noted that precursors to Cambrian fossils would need to be discovered. 87 years later they were).
• DNA Inheritance (Specifically showing that it is the method of biological inheritance. DNA had been isolated as far back as the 19th century, but we didn't know what it did)
• Neutral theory of evolution (the mathematical approach to population genetics that concluded the vast majority of mutations that move towards fixation are due to random genetic drift and not survival of the fittest. Also gives a sound mathematical framework for the genetic clock).
• Stellar nucleosynthesis (The creation of heavy chemical elements in stars, and the explanation for why the observed abundances of elements in the universe seem to change over time with larger quantities of heavier elements showing up recently)
• Plate Tectonics (the continents are moving and used to be together)
• Big Bang Theory (the universe was very dense and hot in the distant past, and we can still see that hot dense moment in cosmic microwave background radiation)
• Nebular hypothesis (the hypothesis that the current solar system was formed by a collapsing of a dust nebula)
• The Standard Model/Quantum Field Theory (the unification of the electromagnetic, weak nuclear force, and strong nuclear force into a single equation)
• Stellar Evolution (the process by which a star changes over the course of time, and the explanation for supernovae, neutron stars, white dwarfs, etc).
• Giant Impact Hypothesis (the hypothesis that the Moon was formed when a Mars-sized object collided with the early earth).
• Molecular Phylogenetics (this one is messy to pin on a timeline, cause it really came in in stages as we got better at sequencing DNA. Modern full genome molecular phylognetics didn't become a thing till about 2010. But even in the 90s, we could isolate individual genes for individual species and knew, for example, that chimpanzees and humans are more genetically similar than either is to a gorilla. And even in the 70s, molecular phylogenetics were used to identify Archaea as a "third domain of life"--more on that later).
• Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (the current best model of the universe progressing from the very early dense period through till today, including explaining why there seems to be more mass in the universe than the visible bright stuff like stars--note that this one is currently on thin ice due to the "crisis in cosmology" and may be overturned soonish. Basically we have two measurements, one would make the universe 13.8 billion years old, and the other would make the universe 12.7 billion years old, and both have error bars much smaller than a billion years suggesting we may need to go back to the drawing board on the mathematical model itself. But...some astronomers argue measurement error or a calibration error, so Lambda-CDM might still survive this challenge. Not dead quite yet!)
• Snowball Earth (Geologists conclude that the entire earth was covered in glaciers at certain geologic moments)

21st century

• Hologenome theory of evolution (This theory re-casts things like an animal and all of their internal microbiome as being a singular organism being acted upon by evolution).
• Theory of Common Descent (all cellular life is shown conclusively to have descended from a singular ancestor--this finally answered Darwin's "one or a few common ancestors" -- it's one common ancestor for cellular life. Meanwhile it's multiple separate ancestries for viruses).
• Higgs Boson (the particle required to give mass to all elementary particles is detected)
• Gravitational Waves (first proposed by Einstein's General Relativity. Now we have detectors for them, and are building more detectors, and have detected stuff like black hole mergers).
• Eukaryotes as descending from Asgard Archaea (whoops, back to 2 domains of life. But now instead of the 2 domains being "prokaryotes" and "eukaryotes" they're "bacteria" and "archaea").
• Picture of a Black Hole (maybe) (We took a picture of a black hole. Note that this is still somewhat disputed: the resolution is quite low, and there are simulations suggesting that a very dense but not quite black hole level dense area of space would look the same at the low resolution we currently have)
• Abiogenesis (ongoing) (while obviously experiments relating to this were done as far back as the 1950s, I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of the research is in the 21st century, and that work is frankly in progress. A bit like Quantum Physics in the early 20th century--some of the experiments had been done in the previous century, but the work of assembling a cohesive theory happened in the following century).

---

One general theme worth noting is that often old models aren't fully overturned, we just zoom in a little more. Molecular Orbital Theory in 1933 didn't exactly make Dalton's 1804 Atomic Theory false, it's just a more precise version. Einstein describing gravity in General Relativity didn't make Newton's gravity completely wrong, but it is more precise. The existence (and even predominance) of genetic drift doesn't mean natural selection doesn't happen, it still does.

Anyway, I made list, hope you like list.

I wanted to write a post about Directed Evolution, which, in my opinion, is to date the best evidence we can observe in the lab that evolution is real.

Directed Evolution is the practice of purposefully inducing mutations to natural enzimes and then selecting for activity or specificity.

After many rounds, new and more efficient enzimes can be evolved.

As Directed Evolution has so many environmental applications - for example, developing new enzimes to degrade toxic chemicals or synthetic polymers - I was looking for a specific paper about in vitro evolution of nylonase.

Googling the words "evolution" and "nylonase" I've found out that this enzime has generated a considerable controversy since its discovery in the 70s in a bacterium called Arthrobacter. There's even a Wikipedia page entirely dedicated to this controversy!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria_and_creationism

As synthetic polyamides like Nylon-6 weren't available in the environment before the 20th century, the only possible explanation is that the genes coding for nylonases (yes, there are more than one: NylA, NylC, NylB and NylB') evolved in just a few decades.

Initially, it was even proposed that this could be an example of an origination de novo of a new gene, which means the evolution of a new gene not from an already existing one, but from random non coding material.

Of course, creationists reject any mechanism of new gene evolution, as they believe that any mutation is deleterious and that mutations can only degrade information but never create novelty.

However, digging a bit more, I've found out that in this particular case, the nylonases genes have created a complete short circuit in creationists brains.

As they can't deny that nylonase enzimes are real and are recent, they have committed themselves to the task of disproving the de novo origination of nylonase (a hypothesis that has since been rejected by the scientic community). But they have committed themselves so much to this goal that they have beem actively advocating for an origin from a duplication and neofunctionalization, the most common mechanism of gene evolution that they have always denied!

See for yourself famous creationists Sal Cordova and John Sanford advocating for homology of genes, a concept they have always rejected, in this preprint:

https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/201905.0123

In 1984, Susumu Ohno hypothesized that the nylon-degrading enzyme NylB arose de novo via a frameshift mutation within a hypothetical precursor protein (PR.C). However, Ohno never tested his hypothesis or provided supporting biological evidence. For decades, Ohno’s famous frame-shift hypothesis has been uncritically accepted as the correct explanation for the origin of NylB and has been used to illustrate how simple it is for a totally new enzyme to arise spontaneously. In this paper we test Ohno’s hypothesis in light of data not available in 1984. We searched multiple protein databases and found that the NylB protein is widely occurring, has thousands of homologs, and is found in diverse organisms and diverse habitats. Conserved domain searches showed that the NylB sequence is homologous to beta lactamases - a family of highly conserved enzymes. However, our searches showed that there is no evidence for the existence of Ohno’s hypothetical PR.C protein, nor any credible homolog. Our results effectively falsify Ohno's frameshift hypothesis. We extended this analysis to other nylonases and found all the nylonases we examined had large numbers of homologs throughout the biosphere. This falsifies the long-held assumption that all nylonases evolved after the invention of nylon in 1935.

We are explaining how evolution works to you and this somehow falsifies evolution!

By the way, if you are curious about the current scientific consensus on the homology of NylB, just read the Evolutionary Implication section in this paper:

https://www.jbc.org/article/S0021-9258(20)59178-3/fulltext

I‘ve seen creationists use some variation of saying that a more complex thing has a greater need it has for a creator so that if the less complex thing was designed then so was the more complex thing. For instance I’ve seen creationists argue that we know a watch was designed because it’s complex and that humans are much more complex than watches and so must be designed.

I think one of the problems with this argument is that I’ve seen other humans make complex devices, whether or not I saw people make a watch specifically, so inferring that a watch is designed isn’t just because the watch is complex but from either having observed humans make watches or create similar things. There are no confirmed cases of someone observing a deity create a human, and claims of people seeing a deity directly can be explained as people either hallucinating, or lying, or otherwise being mistaken for other reasons.

I think a counter example to the idea that complexity implies creation that might be easy to understand for most lay people might be to think about paperclips and snowflakes. I mean a snowflake is more complex than a paperclip, yet it’s the snowflake that is known to have a natural explanation, while the paperclip is known to be designed by humans.

When I go to museums I find myself retaining very little information, because often it's more of me gawking at shiny orbs and large paintings. So when people go to the Ark Encounter or Creation Museum, for that reason alone I doubt much is learned. Which isn't saying museums aren't critical and useful. People do learn a lot there, but there are also a large chunk of people who aren't really focusing that hard. Hopefully you leave a museum learning 1-2 new things.

However, the frustration with Creationism is that there is an entire industry with followers of it that are devoted to denying science, mainly evolution. I may not understand genetics but I don't claim to have a better theory under my belt and I don't claim all of the experts are lying. The laity of Creationism make these claims, but they don't even bother trying to understand what they claim isn't true. In many cases I think, not all of course.

I was talking to my friend that's a Creationist, and he told me that he watched videos on YouTube from creators that made very compelling challenges. He couldn't name any examples though. He had no idea what the creationist arguments were that he watched. It's fine to not understand something, but it's frustrating when someone says evolution is "probably" not true when they can't even parrot any of the claims they say are convincing.

I told him that what actually happened is he watched intelligent looking people say things he didn't understand, and because they share the same beliefs as him, he believed them. To his credit: he said I was probably right. Though he still is a Creationist unfortunately.

I think if Creationists actually read Ken Ham's words, and read his "theories" that lions could have been eating plants in the Garden of Eden, they would stop being Creationist. I think they like the aesthetics of having science. They like having published books and charts and all of the things that look scientific, but if you actually read the arguments, you realize it's nonsense. They let the creationist leaders think for them.

I don't think Ken Ham believes what he peddles. He knows the biology textbooks don't talk about "star evolution" and those PhDs he hires know what star nucleosynthesis is. He also makes a lot of money pretending he doesn't know these things.

In a prior thread "Why do Young Earth Creationists seem to prefer for the Earth to be young?" there are some intensely revealing comments about why anti-evolution zealots, young-earth creationists, and other purveyors of anti-science cult talking points act as they do.

• One creationist who aggressively wanted to give sermons when informed that his sermonizing had "not much science there," declared "Exactly my friend. It's all about truth." Most of his follow-up replies are deleted for violating sub rules against preaching.
• Another wrote "It’s not a preference. It’s what the Bible indicates, and the young age is corroborated by many physical evidences" followed by fucking off and never providing any of the "many physical evidences" they claimed existed.
• Still another, when it was pointed out that religion-induced anxiety disorders are commonplace, and that forcibly indoctrinating children can constitute child abuse, remarked "So would you say teaching the child anything is abuse?" and then followed up with "I could say the same about you and that you are indoctrinating your children ;)" before making an unsubstantiated claim about "a lot of abuse happening in atheist ideologies as well." When asked to name the "atheist ideologies" it was referring to, it declined to do so.

A particularly telling one offered a number of inane claims along with admitting they were using AI to generate their slop responses, including:

1. "Abiogenesis is the start of your guys world view."
2. It’s a beliefs system like Christianity. I would argue Christian’s have more evidence. When you get into the weeds of evolution it’s a whole bunch idk but it must have happened. Like how do you evolve step by step chemically speaking the process of going from not having a liver to a liver. Than your probably going to say ok this happens than this than this…. Ok but still not able to reproduce it in a lab setting so it’s irelevent.

The underlying issue, and why the anti-science religious cannot be taken seriously, seems to be this: they reject the very premises of scientific inquiry. They treat the scientific method, and the very ideas of working with a hypothesis and following the evidence through structured inquiry and experimentation, as a competing organization, the same way that they view other religions.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywkCEQKHqHw
  • starts at 9:25
  • conclusion at 57:20

The funniest part for me is at around 29:00. Someone replied to Dr. Dan saying that his profession, "evolutionary biologist", includes a declaration of a belief, as opposed to "regular biologists". This perfectly demonstrates the extent of the inculcation. This inculcation is shown in part 7 of PBS's Evolution, where the kids are made to sing along during a Ken Ham function:

🎵 "I don't believe in evolution / I know creation is true"

Seven months ago when I looked into the history I said the same thing: I'd love for a creationist to try and make their case without a single reference to evolutionary biology or a fringe reading of the bible. And that creationism is a reactionary ideology, i.e. without Darwin et al. there wouldn't be creationism as its own standalone thing - it would just be a dime a dozen theology (or mythology for the historically inclined) without an -ism or -ist.
YECists, of course, have a thought-terminating cliche that has been drilled into their being (seriously, kudos to the former creationists - you give me hope):

"Same evidence, different interpretation"
(as if science is literary criticism)

Even playing along with that thought-terminating cliche, they still cannot make a case without straw manning the science. Case in point, when creationists completely lose the plot and confidently share their "papers" outside of their circles, which happened to me here a few months ago; here's my reenactment of one such paper's methodology (and while my tone is flippant, the events are accurate - see pdf page 2; pdf via Web Archive):

• A theologian, a writer, and their YEC ego walked into a lab

• They gave the lab some samples, and asked for radiocarbon dating.

• The lab obliged. The lab also provided the calibrated figures.

• Our trio said thanks, but no thanks to the calibrated figures.

  • You see, they don't believe in radiocarbon dating; they just wanted to prove that the samples contained carbon-14 (because they believe in radioactivity - no wait, uhm, anyway I'm sure it makes sense to the trio).

• The trio then wrote it up to look like an academic paper.

• And the target readers of said write-up also refer to it as a paper.

  • (✨ bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, you've just witnessed peer review)

The trio and their readers now firmly feel vindicated, and believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that the discovery of carbon-14 where it does not belong (according to them - a theologian and a writer) shatters our knowledge of Earth's history - plus, five labs found the same thing (n.b. the same thing where the calibration was rejected, mind you).

---

It's truly amazing that they don't realize that they have to make a positive case for their position.

It seems like Young Earth Creationists often tend to prefer for the Earth to be young as opposed to old, and that’s part of why they believe it.

To me it seems like even from the point of view of believing whatever one likes best regardless of the evidence it still doesn’t make a lot of sense to believe the Earth is Young.

I mean I think the scientific description of Earths history seems like a much richer version of history than genesis, in addition to being what’s actually supported by the evidence. I mean I think being able to learn about the different animals and plants that lived millions of years ago, and how some animals were descended from other animals that I likely would have never guessed on my own is what makes learning about evolution interesting.

I also think it’s more uplifting to think about how we evolved than to believe that we started out in a perfect world and were kicked out of Eden. I mean if we really would have come from a perfect garden then that would indicate that our best time as a species would be behind us, because nothing could ever compare to a perfect world. Thinking about how, going far back enough, our ancestors would have been quadrupedal and been no more intelligent than modern non human apes, and how we as a species have been able to improve our lives with our intelligence seems a lot more like an improvement.

Well I know some people find comfort in religion, but it’s possible to be religious and still accept the scientific consensus on the history of Earth.

So I’m wondering why Young Earth Creationists seem to prefer for the Earth to be young?

I’ve been thinking about what I would consider science denial as opposed to skepticism and where I would put creationist arguments I’ve seen online, mainly inspired by Will Duffy’s comments about science denial on Gutsick Gibbon’s livestreams. Here’s what I think:

Science is founded on the assumption that human knowledge is fallible and that we should rigorously test our ideas to see if they are inconsistent with reality. Only ideas that have passed a certain level of scientific rigor are allowed to be considered “true”, and only as long as they keep continually meeting this standard.

Creationists can argue that the proponents of evolution haven't applied the required level of rigor to make their conclusions. That’s totally fine by the scientific method - skepticism is not just acceptable, but is a requirement after all. However, this skepticism must go both ways; anyone claiming to be scientific is also required to be equally skeptical of creationism, and must apply the same level of rigor to demonstrate that creationism is a valid description of reality. This is where I consider creationists to be science deniers. From what I’ve experienced, they are infinitely skeptical of evolution while being infinitely credulous of creationism. I actually don’t really have a problem with this - everyone can believe whatever they want, if I want to keep an open mind I can’t just say they’re wrong, only that it’s very unlikely based on the evidence I’ve seen. My personal problem is that they are claiming to be scientific and claiming scientific authority without demonstrating that they have rigorously tested their beliefs the same way evolutionary scientists have demonstrated their rigor. What I’ve seen is that they don’t make an effort to test their hypotheses, don’t make an effort to interact with the available literature and don’t submit their own original research for peer review. They’re simply trying their best to dress up their dogmatism in a lab coat and passing it off as valid science.

Another issue I have is that every creationist I’ve heard talk about evolution completely misrepresents the reasoning behind why people believe in evolution. I’m not a biologist, not even a scientist, and I can’t claim to have read a significant amount of literature or examined a significant amount of evidence, so one can argue that I’m working on a certain level of faith. Sure, I can accept that. But what I can’t accept is my beliefs being misrepresented to others. For example, I’ve heard many creationists say that there is no evidence of transitional fossils, without acknowledging what most evolutionary proponents would consider as evidence for transitional fossils. It’s one thing to acknowledge their existence and provide reasoning to conclude that they aren’t actually valid evidence for transitional fossils; that is scientific skepticism which is perfectly fine with me. However, it’s a completely different matter to claim that there are no transitional fossils. That would be an outright lie.

I try to keep an open mind, but the fact is that I haven’t come across any reason to doubt evolution, despite creationists best efforts. In my experience so far, all I’ve seen is misunderstanding, misrepresentation, omission and outright lies regarding the evidence for evolution.

I originally compiled this list, showing evolution being proven step-by-step, for a comment on Youtube. But creationists, let me know if there's anything specific I'm missing.

Scientists observe environments with zero life- only the chemicals evolutionary biologists have been saying lead to life, and single cell organisms emerge:

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2024-12-31/protocells-emerge-in-experiment-simulating-lifeless-world-there-is-no-divine-breath-of-life.html

Scientists test what a lifeless ocean would be like in Earth's youth- and the result is ALL of the chemicals used in the above experiment, and then some:

https://www.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/simulating-early-ocean-vents-shows-lifes-building-blocks-form-under-pressure

But just because a lifeless ocean being what it almost certainly would be like, is gauranteed to create single cell organisms, how do we get from there to multicellular organisms?:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/scientists-re-create-the-microbial-dance-that-sparked-complex-life-20250102

And the steps in our evolution keep getting proven in controlled environments from there with TONS of examples. Not to mention the individual examples of evolution being obseved throughout history: black moths appearing in the Arctic only after humans started leaving black surfaces, the Russian scientists who bred a new domestic breed of fox, etc. ect.

https://youtu.be/LBrPv21ZiDk?is=oh0cInP_1tOYPtxL

The chemist and professor at Rice University James Tour presents himself online as an expert on the origin of life.

However, when suggested to ask a question to Lee Cronin by Piers Morgan, his question is: "is there any other scientific hypothesis for the origin of life rather than prebiotic soup?"

Really??

This guys pretends to be an expert on the topic, yet he doesn't even know about the cyanosulfidric protometabolism hypothesis of Sutherland, he doesn't know about the metabolism first hypothesis developed by William Martin, Michael J Russell and Harold J Morowitz (as a modern and updated version of the iron-sulfur world hypothesis proposed by Wächtershäuser) and popularized by Nick Lane?

How can anyone take someone like James Tour seriously, if he is still stuck in the Miller-Urey experiment and can't even open Google Scholar and keep up with the recent advancements and publications of the last decades?

TL;DR: Next time someone brings up "macroevolution" in its twisted sense, tell them it was solved a hundred years ago.
This post is dedicated to and is on the heels of someone dodging (by bringing up "macroevolution") my previous post:

Each of the four founders of population genetics worked on what each considered a puzzle that needed solving. (Puzzles are what scientists work on, exactly as I highlighted in my previous post.) They were instrumental in ending the "eclipse of Darwinism" (which was roughly from 1880-1920). Of the four, the reader here has probably heard of Wright, Fisher, and Haldane. Less known, because of the RFK Lysenko purge, was Sergei Chetverikov:

The only one of the four founders of population genetics who directly confronted this central problem was Sergei Chetverikov. It was not difficult for him to do so: he had worked for 20 years as one of Russia’s leading butterfly taxonomists. An entomologist and systematist, he actually first taught genetics in a course at Moscow University entitled “Theoretical Systematics.” In Chetverikov’s classic work of 1926, “On Certain Aspects of Evolution From the Viewpoint of Modern Genetics,” the entire first section addressed the central problem. There, he argued that the traits determined by Mendelian genes in Drosophila (e.g., venation and wing structure) are the very same traits which are “fundamental in modern systematics for distinguishing higher systematic categories” (Chetverikov 1926: 9–10). Elsewhere in this same section, he mobilized his considerable knowledge of the systematics and classification of Diptera and Lepidoptera to make the same point.
(https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65536-5_8)

In short, a hundred years ago it was shown that the very traits that are used to distinguish the higher taxa, are the very traits that have variation within species.
This is the earliest working out of the problem that I could find.

---

I'll now anticipate two "rebuttals" (red herrings):

This interesting history doesn't matter to the working scientist - i.e. there's no reason to expect scientists to be scholars of history. The scientists see it for themselves! Here's an example I posted a year ago: A former missionary wanted to study evolution to knock it down from the inside, but what did she find?

A couple of years into Ella Al-Shamahi’s degree in evolutionary biology, she felt herself changing. A lecturer was demonstrating how lab experiments that artificially separated fruit flies showed the process of speciation beginning. “And I remember hearing that and being like,” she closes her eyes and takes a grim, tight breath, “oh, fuck.” [...] But it was retrotransposons, which she arrived at in her masters, looking at bits of DNA within humans that are the remnants of long gone organisms, that left her with no explanation other than the process of evolution. She tried. She really tried. [...]
(observer.co.uk)

The second thing:
Please, dear "skeptic", stop parroting nonsense about "body plans":

in evo‐devo, the term “body plan” is often used without any real definition, as though it were more a metaphysical concept than a scientific one. And adjectives such as fundamental, basic, or general are sometimes prefixed to “body plan” without adding any scientific meaning (as in “the basic vertebrate body plan”).
(https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9292786/)

It's a term from a bygone era that preceded evolutionary biology.
Some define it as:

A body plan is a set of features plesiomorphically shared by extant taxa in a monophyletic clade.
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10881389/) [thank you u/gitgud_x]

And that definition is utterly useless if someone just looks up "synapomorphies".

When scientists talk about macroevolution, they don't use it in the silly creationist/"skeptical-but-can't-be-bothered-to-read-anything" sense, rather it's about the pattern and rate, not the process, as Dr. Zach clarified in his reply to my older post on macroevolution.

Dr. Dan ends his videos with, "Don't get fooled".
I'll end this with, Dear skeptic, don't be a parrot.

As most of you are aware, Erika (a.k.a. Gutsick Gibbon) has been attempting to teach the creationist Will Duffy about evolution. Erika’s presentations are great, they’re chock full of evidence for both the old age of the earth, as well as evolutionary processes. It’s more than enough to inform any honest, intelligent person about why people consider evolution to be true. But as the old saying goes, when it comes to a creationist, pick two: informed, honest, intelligent. Thanks to Erika, Duffy has been informed. Yet he remains a creationist.

In Erika’s most recent lesson, Will told his followers to stop saying that Erika is dodging a debate with noted clown Jimbob. Reading in between the lines a bit, it seems Duffy asked Erika directly if she’d been dodging Jimbob, and she said that she hadn’t, that she “would love to make it happen”.

Will then follows this up with a claim that no one has been able to demonstrate to Jimbob that evolution “can be brought through the scientific method”. He then asks for “someone smart out there” to show Jimbob how evolution can be considered a scientific theory.

Of course, this is pure rhetoric. If Will actually cared about learning, he wouldn’t give a damn about whether or not Jimbob can be convinced of the scientific legitimacy of evolutionary theory. He would be focused on his own understanding of it. What he is doing here is stating, for the purpose of influencing the audience, that there are others who doubt the merits of evolution too, and they have been victorious in debate. This rhetoric also serves as an advertisement. Will has assumed the handle “Evolution Showdown” on youtube, and reading in between the lines again, his purpose is likely to platform debates with the likes of jimbob et al.

Who else does Duffy intend to platform? If we go by who he platformed in the rest of his “rebuttal” to Erika, it will be a menagerie of racists. The most ‘fun’ one is Vox Day, who is such an unrepentantly silly person that he’s crossed that invisible boundary from being offensive to being amusing. He is a “we purposely trained him wrong, as a joke” sort of character. Will says that he discovered Vox by “mere chance or divine intervention”. Let’s hope it’s chance, because it would be troubling for the rest of us if God Himself wanted Duffy to learn at the feet of an avowed white supremacist who thinks marital rape is just something women sign up for. Will then says that Vox is “way smarter than me”, this despite the fact that Vox has difficulty multiplying three numbers together.

At the beginning of Will’s rebuttal, he platforms “a friend of his” on twitter who said:

“Folks with high testosterone (males) generally elevate truth over consensus and fairness. Those with low testosterone (females) generally elevate consensus and fairness over truth.”

Will found this comment very insightful. The source for this claim was a paper titled Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors by Clark et al. (2024). As Erika shows here (timestamped at ~12:00), Will’s friend distorts data from the Clark et al. paper. Oh, and the twitter account which Will’s friend is responding to belongs to a notorious white supremacist named Jordan Lasker.

The rabbit hole does not stop there. I remember hearing the name Jordan Lasker. He is not a casual white supremacist. He writes papers like Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability in support of his views.

That paper is a little bit famous because it got one its coauthors fired. Bryan J. Pesta, an economics professor, was stripped of tenure because, in an attempt to further the claim that black people are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent on white people, he broke the NIH’s rules on handling data.

The NIH restricts access to their data to protect and respect study participants, in part because permitting misleading or degrading use of sensitive data would undermine the public’s willingness to participate in studies and, in turn, result in less robust databases for researchers’ use. Pesta’s data access requests said he wanted to study things like the “diagnosis rates for different mental disorders (e.g., schizophrenia, depression) across ethnic groups.” This is not what he used the data for. In other words, he lied. He was fired for lying to access data. Of course, the racist right-wing rage-o-sphere to which Will belongs has such high-T and love for truth that they had to spin this reality into ‘suppression of the truth’. Unfortunately for Will et al., the Sixth Circuit Court of appeals upheld summary judgment for the university. But you know, maybe those were some activist judges high on estrogen.

The other co-authors of that “Global Ancestry” paper are also some high-testosterone grip-it, rip-it ‘truthseekers’ like Pesta, Vox, and Will. Emil O. W. Kirkegaard is especially notable. For a little insight into him, in 2012 he published a blog on the subject of ‘the ban of child porn possession’. In his post, he suggested that abusers should be allowed to rape children drugged with sleeping medicine. His argument was:

If they dont notice, it is difficult to see how they cud[sic] be harmed, even if it is rape

Emil claims that the post was a utilitarian thought experiment about harm reduction, not a proposal to legalize child abuse. He acknowledges that it was poorly written. But you know, he’s also the founder of something called the Human Diversity Foundation (now renamed to Polygenic Scores). It short, it’s a racist right-wing advocacy group that was assembled out of the carcass of the the Pioneer Fund. To get a taste of what the Pioneer Fund was up to:

One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.

So, these people were, and are, literal nazis.

For those who aren’t steeped in the history of this nonsense, the Pioneer Fund was, in its later years, headed by Richard Lynn, a prominent “scientific racist”. Lynn’s shoddy data formed part of the spine of the book,“The Bell Curve”.

Hope Not Hate did an insightful investigative piece on the Human Diversity Foundation. It revealed that Emil’s HDF has two arms, a ‘research’ arm, which aims to put out papers in the vein of Lasker et al.’s “Global Ancestry”, and a ‘media’ arm, which aims to sanitize these views to the public. The media arm consists of a youtube channel and a website/podcast. One of the people deeply involved in all of this, both the media arm and the HDF ‘research team’, is a fellow named Bo Winegard.

Like Pesta, Winegard was “fired” from his university (Marietta College). “Fired” is in quotations here, because he wasn’t fired, the college simply chose not to renew his contract. The college declined to comment on the reasoning for doing so. But I think the reason is clear: Winegard was publicly racist. So yes, he was disavowed for his views. To get a taste, he tweeted (and later deleted) the following:

The greatest challenge to affluent societies is dealing openly, honestly, and humanely with biological (genetic) inequality. If we don’t meet this challenge, I suspect our countries will be torn apart from the inside like a tree destroyed by parasites.

If that’s not some nazi-coded langauge, I don’t know what is. Winegard claims, that “the simile about parasites was a reference to political conflict and not a reference to some group of humans or another.”

But you know, the fact that he is part of an organization that has inherited the mantle of a literal, actual Nazi organization, well, I am tempted to doubt his innocence. And then, as part of that organization, working as executive editor for the website/podcast ‘Aporia’, he has interviewed white supremacist eugenicists like Jared Taylor, and Helmuth Nyborg, with podcast titles like, “Are multicultural societies doomed?” If there’s any doubt about who and what Winegard is, he has called upon his readers to “embrace” white identity politics and believes racial stereotypes are “reasonably accurate”.

You’ll never guess who else Winegard has interviewed as part of this project. No, it’s not Will Duffy. It’s Cory Clark! Who is Cory Clark? She is none other than the principal author of the "Taboo" paper that Will Duffy’s friend quote tweeted. Surprise!

Well, maybe Clark isn’t one of these ‘scientific racists’ working to sanitize a racist agenda. After all, as that Hope Not Hate article states:

Aporia has tried to appeal to what it considers “high-value” readers by hosting well-known commentators and authors on its podcast. Peter Hitchens, the Mail on Sunday columnist, Louise Perry, the reactionary feminist author, and Noam Chomsky, the linguistics professor, have all appeared on Aporia or its predecessor, Ideas Sleep Furiously. “We’re using these people to get legitimacy by association,” Frost said.

Maybe Clark was just suckered in and didn’t know what Winegard was about, or what she was getting into. Unfortunately, this is a too charitable. You see, Bo Winegard himself is a co-author of Clark’s paper! Yes, the very same paper that Duffy cited. And more, Winegard and Clark have published, by my count, eleven papers together going back to 2019, with some greatest hits such as:

Tribalism Is Human Nature (2019)

[Retracted] Declines in Religiosity Predict Increases in Violent crime—but Not Among Countries With Relatively High Average IQ (2020)

Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias (2023)

So now, when you read that “Taboos” paper which Duffy and his friend were so fond of, you begin to understand the motivation for it. Here we have some racists annoyed that the consensus is against them, and so they seek to justify an argument which says that we can’t actually know what the consensus is because scientists are self-censoring. Note that some of the language in the paper which sounds like its coming right out of a creationist’s conspiracy theory:

…But conflicts can also delay scientific progress by creating peer hostility, setting boundaries on what is thinkable, and intimidating scholars into conformity or silence

And this juicy bit which, I think, gives the game away (they even cite themselves):

A primary goal of science is to pursue an empirically accurate description of the natural world, and nature does not always conform to human social values and desires. Indeed, the claim that humans strive to climb status hierarchies (as among scientists) is likely true (Clark & Winegard, 2020; Storr, 2021), but it is not a particularly flattering view of human nature. A scholar speaking the truth—or at least what he or she sincerely believes to be true, on the basis of the evidence—may occasionally offend some or even most people.

And now, the conspiratorial cherry on top. First, to refresh memories, Jordan Lasker is the white supremacist whose tweet Duffy is fond of. Now, I have no direct evidence of this, but I bet Jordan Lasker and Bo Winegard know each other. Both write extensively about the superiority of white people, and both collaborate with Emil Kirkgaard. Kirkgaard and company are pretty explicitly trying to shift the racist overton window. I think this paper is part of that project. It’s intent is to cast doubt on the scientific consensus on ‘taboo’ subjects, by giving heat to the idea that scientists aren’t sharing their true beliefs for fear of professional reprisal. Lasker then gave his friend’s paper a boost on twitter. And now it is grist for the grifter’s mill.

A great irony here is that these professional racists absolutely believe in evolution.

And now I’m gripped by rather uncomfortable fear. Keep in mind, I am FULLY engrossed in a Charlie Day-esque Pepe Silvia conspiracy theory at this point. Because Will Duffy seems to be consistently impressed with racists. Some of these racists are “scientific” racists who contend that ‘races’ are real evolutionary categories. Both they, and creationists, believe they are being locked out of universities and research because of their views. All of them want to sanitize their views to a broader audience. And Will Duffy is going to start a youtube channel called “Evolution Showdown”.

I wonder where Duffy is going to go with this? I wonder if people like Jordan Lasker or Bo Winegard are going to make an appearance?

The topic of Dover came up here a few days ago. This led me to a 2008 article from the fine folks at the NCSE:

... In particular, Behe criticizes a 1994 Proceedings of the National Academy of Science paper advancing the hypothesis that the RAG system evolved by lateral transfer of a prokaryotic transposon¹³, an idea initially suggested in a 1979 paper¹⁴ and expanded in 1992 (ref. 15). Behe ridicules the idea as a "jump in the box of Calvin and Hobbes,"² with reference to the comic strip in which a child and his stuffed tiger imaginary friend use a large cardboard box for fantasy trips and amazing physical transformations.
The timing for the criticism could not have been worse, as soon after publication of Darwin's Black Box, solid evidence for the transposon hypothesis began accumulating with the demonstration of similarities between the variable-diversity-joining recombination and transposition mechanisms¹⁶ and also between shark RAG1 and certain bacterial integrases¹⁷. Since then, a steady stream of findings has continued to add more substance to the model, as RAG proteins have been shown to be capable of catalyzing transposition reactions, first in vitro^{18, 19} and then in vivo^{20, 21, 22}, and to have even closer structural and mechanistic similarities with specific transposases²³. Finally, in 2005, the original key prediction ...
Immunology in the Spotlight at the Dover 'Intelligent Design' Trial | National Center for Science Education

Out of curiosity, about the history of science, I went down a rabbit hole starting from ref. 13 (1994) and ended up with papers from 1989 to 1991. I then compared the content, with Behe's coverage thereof in his book. He paints the articles as stories. He cites perspective pieces and asks where are the numbers. Meanwhile, the actual articles reference experimental work! Then he lists some verbs in isolation (Quote Mining Extreme Edition). This is like someone complaining about "copying" and "repelling" in the context of DNA or electrons.

Anyway, the details don't matter - the above quote handles that. Here's my issue (or rather the issue I want to highlight to the target audience of this sub):

This is a case of curious and hard workers doing excellent scientific induction based on known processes, and Behe (and company) call that storytelling. This I can file under stupidity/ignorance. But then they turn around and want their reader to buy their magic-did-it STORY - a literal story. Basically Behe was offended at the notion that some scientists were trying to figure out a puzzle. A puzzle he wants unsolved, forever and ever. This is all there is to it. They are by no stretch of the imagination scientists.

Which brings me to the title question...

This post is ad hom free.

This just dropped from Donny over at Standing for Truth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAe-chLH4Sk I heard nothing but a bunch of presupposition interpretation, and in my opinion this just gets us to Last Thursdayism because that about as testable as these guys claims

VD is touting that his math was “critically” reviewed by an “an actual mathematician”.

Who is this you may ask?

A statistics professor who is a self proclaimed YEC and associated with the Discovery Institute.

I would LOVE for somehow to try to explain how this is a “critical” and appropriate review. Especially because the criticism of VD’s work is that he doesn’t understand the biology to properly apply the math to, and Dr. Hossjer isn’t a biologist.

Borrowing /u/Soft-Cake-9846's excellent title, I'll just make this broader claim.

I've been casually keeping a "this is absurd" catalog for people involved in the science communicator level of science denialism within the context of evolution. Things like Matt Powell deceptively editing debates, or Professor Dave's infamous tweet. I use these two examples not to suggest both sides are the same, but only to illustrate I'm collecting any data I find.

I've also been working my way through the Kitzmiller v Dover transcripts. At the time, I was in my anti-evolution prime. This time, I guess I'm just adding to my "what even are these people doing" file.

Back then, I would have taken an exchange like this as evidence of how 'evolutionists' just want to paint critics in the worst possible light:

Q (Rothschild, challenging the school district): Seeing into the future is one of the powers of the intelligent design movement?

A (Michael Behe): I think --

MR. MUISE: Objection, argumentative.

MR. ROTHSCHILD: I'll withdraw it, Your Honor.

But now, let's look at what led up to that exchange (same speakers), edited for efficiency and emphasis added, but the transcript is available:

Q Before we leave Pandas, you said this was not a statement you would have signed off on, correct?

A Yes.

Q But you actually were a critical reviewer of Pandas, correct; that's what it says in the acknowledgments page of the book?

A That's what it lists there, but that does not mean that I critically reviewed the whole book and commented on it in detail, yes.

Q What did you review and comment on, Professor Behe?

A I reviewed the literature concerning blood clotting, and worked with the editor on the section that became the blood clotting system. So I was principally responsible for that section.

Q So you were reviewing your own work?

A I was helping review or helping edit or helping write the section on blood clotting.

Q Which was your own contribution?

A That's -- yes, that's correct.

Q That's not typically how the term "critical review" is used; would you agree with that?

A Yeah, that's correct.

Q Telling the readers of Pandas that you were a critical reviewer of that book is misleading, isn't it?

A I disagree. As I said, that's not the typical way that the term "critical reviewer" is used, but nonetheless, in my opinion I don't think it is misleading.

So Behe, fully cognizant that this is an abnormal usage of the term, doesn't think it's misleading? These are not serious people. The transcript continues:

Q Professor Behe, are you aware that a new edition of Pandas is being developed called, The Design of Life?

A Yes.

Q Are you an author of that book?

A I am not an author of that book.

Q And Mr. Dembski, who is the author of Design of Life, described you as a co-author of the book, correct?

A That's what he does, yes.

Q That's false, isn't it?

A Again, I am not an author of the book, but William Dembski, several years ago, asked if I would contribute. And I explained to him that I did not have the time to do so. And he says well, perhaps, you know, in the future he could solicit material from me and then I would be one of the authors of the book. So, that's correct.

Q So that makes you a co-author right now, Professor Behe?

A I certainly would not have listed myself now as a co-author, however, I think that he was anticipating my future participation in the project.

Q So that's a true statement, Professor Behe, that you're a co-author?

A It is not now a true statement but it might be in the future.

Q Okay. Professor Behe, you know who Jon Buell is, correct? He's the president of Foundation for Thought and Ethics? And they were the publisher of Pandas when you participated?

A That's correct.

Q And look at line 11. And Mr. Buell is asked, "Who are the authors of Design of Life as you understand it?" And can you read his answer?

A He says, "Kenyon, Davis, Dembski, Behe and Wells, Jonathan Wells."

Q So Mr. Buell thinks you're an author too?

A That's correct. I think he's working under the same impression as Bill, that he wanted to get together people who were most involved with the intelligent design movement to have a book which would be authored by them. And again, I told them that right now I was too busy. I told them that a couple years ago. But I said that perhaps in the future I could be involved.

Q Mr. Behe, this statement is false, isn't it?

A I'm sorry?

Q The statement is false, isn't it?

A What statement is that?

Q The statement that you're an author, and Mr. Dembski's statement is false too, isn't it?

A That's not what it says on the screen, sir. It says, "Who are the authors of Design of Life as you understand it?" And the way I read that is that he's seeing into the future and seeing when this actually will be published and anticipating that I will participate in the publication of the book at that point.

Q Seeing into the future is one of the powers of the intelligent design movement?

A I think --

MR. MUISE: Objection, argumentative.

MR. ROTHSCHILD: I'll withdraw it, Your Honor.

So Dembski is fully lying, the president of the Foundation for Thought and Ethics is fully lying, and Behe neither asks them to remove his name nor says he asked and was ignored.

These are people whose connection with truth is limited at best, even in the simplest of circumstances.

Isn't there a Bible verse about that?

Basically how many of you follow the evolutionary theory but also arent materialists and believe in awareness existing independently?

This creationist account is looking at a whale fin's bone structure. Either it's a product of overdesign OR it's the product of a blind and dumb process that will settle on a configuration that is 'good enough' rather than optimal.

link

Who can say with certainty, am I right?

This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've seen this week. And I thought Will Duffy deliberately not understanding clades was dumb.

Quoth the anti-evolution YEC:

Today is an historic day! I am announcing for the first time my new scientific method. It's called methodological immaterialism. It is purely an assumption and not testable (just like methodological naturalism). With methodological immaterialism, explanations are restricted to nonphysical causes, processes, and entities. And with methodological immaterialism, if a nonphysical explanation cannot be found, instead of considering a physical explanation you just say that a nonphysical explanation will probably be found one day in the future.

Before I submit my new scientific method for peer review, does anyone see any problems with it?

And later on in the conversation, Will Duffy declares "the point" of this to be "to help people who think methodological naturalism is a good thing to see how dumb it actually is."

Not only is this dishonest, it's a completely insane misrepresentation of methodological naturalism, which is one of the core components of the scientific method.

Methodological naturalism, in cases where we do not have a specific explanation for a phenomenon, predicts that there is a natural, physical, detectable explanation to be found. And the reason for that prediction is simple: as we have scientifically explored our universe, that has never failed to be the case.

---Bonus Dishonesty: claiming a 1982 paper represents the state of scientific peer review.---

He also has this little gem.

The more I learn about the peer review system in science, the more it's clear how broken it is. It's probably beyond repair at this point. The anonymity of reviewers is a major fault. (Google "Reviewer 2" for a perfect example of what a single bad reviewer is capable of.)

A couple academic researchers took a dozen papers that had been peer-reviewed and published and changed the titles, authors, and edited the abstracts and first paragraph of the papers. They then resubmitted them to the same journals 18-32 months after they had already been published. Only 3 of the 12 were caught as resubmissions, but that's not the wildest part. 8 of the remaining 9 were rejected for "serious methodological flaws"! The methodology was identical to what had just been approved and published months prior.

The public has been led to believe that peer review is scientific verification, but this is completely false. It's essentially just editorial review.

Will Duffy's source, traced down by one of the few honest people who comments on his page since he is incapable of honestly providing a citation to be fact checked against his lying, is...

Peters, D. P., & Ceci, S. J. (1982). Peer-Review Practices of Psychological Journals: The Fate of Published Articles, Submitted Again. Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 5 , Issue 2: Special Symposium Issue , June 1982 , pp. 187 - 195

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00011183

Note the date... 1982. A 44 year old paper about testing a small set of psychology journals to see if resubmissions were detected after altering the authorship, abstract, and opening paragraphs. Essentially, testing to see if the very same peer reviewers would receive the same papers back to review again, since the immediate flags of plagiarism - a matching authorship or abstract - were not present.

Will Duffy dishonestly misrepresents this as being an indictment of the entire system of peer review, in service of his attacks on scientific research and the scientific method.

Do you believe in evolution or do you believe we were created, genetically engineered by a higher power like in Prometheus. Share your thoughts.

___________________________________________
| | | |
| Human evolution| Bird evolution | whale evolution |
|———————————————————————————|
| | | | | | | 400$ |
|———————————————————————————|
| | | |
| 800$ | | 800$ |
|———————————————————————————|
| | | |
| 1200$ | | 1200$ |
| ——————————————————————————-|
| | | |
| 1600$ | | 1600$ |
|———————————————————————————|
| 2000$ | | |
|_______________|____________|_______________|

Ask to pick one price for each category, and I will give you a question that is about a Creationist talking point for each of the talking points, good luck!

In which Will Duffy narcissistically refuses to understand basic scientific definitions and pretends that the clades for his grandparents don't include all of their descendants, not just him.

Maybe like the Final Experiment, someone can pay to send him back to grade school please?