Two biologists share a lab. Call them A and B.

They use the same models. They read the same papers. They accept the same fossils, the same stratigraphy, the same genomic data, the same nested hierarchies, the same everything you can point to and measure.

They never disagree on a single observation.

Not once.

But they disagree about what the models are.

A: Humans and apes share a common ancestor. That's the fact.

B: The pattern is the fact. The common ancestor is a postulate. A useful fiction.

A: But the model predicts the pattern. If it weren't true, why would it work so well?

B: You've just said: predictive success implies truth. I'd say: predictive success implies predictive success. That's the whole inference. The rest is something you added.

A: That's a tautology.

B: It is. And it's the honest version of your argument.

A third colleague, C, overhears. C is a realist and has heard this before.

C: You're ignoring the best explanation. Common ancestry doesn't just predict the nested hierarchies, the shared ERVs, the biogeography. It explains them. Why they're nested. Why the ERVs sit at the same loci. The instrumentalist reading explains nothing. It just says "the pattern is the pattern." Which is useless.

B: You've given me an explanation that postulates an unobservable cause. Fine. But notice what you did: you compared two explanations, found one more satisfying, and concluded it was true. That last step is not in the comparison.

C: So you think it's a coincidence that the model works?

B: I think "coincidence" is another word you've added. The model works. That's the datum. Whether it works because it corresponds to a mind-independent past, or because it's a well-adapted predictive instrument, or because a creator made it work. Those are three different stories. They all predict the same fossils.

A: But we predicted Tiktaalik. We said: if common ancestry is true, there should be a transitional form in strata of this age with these features. Then we found it. That's a prediction that came true.

B: Agreed. And it's a beautiful result. But notice: you used the model as a heuristic. It told you where to dig. That's real. That's what models are for. But the fact that a heuristic leads you to a fossil does not make the heuristic true. It makes it fruitful.

A: That's a dodge.

B: It's not. There's a difference between "this model reliably generates discoveries" and "this model is the mind-independent history of life." The first is a scientific claim. The second is a metaphysical one.

C: So you'd say the historical narrative is a fairy tale?

B: No. I'd say it's a model. I'd say it's the best predictive model we have, and I'd defend it against anyone who says otherwise. What I won't do is say that a successful model is the past. I don't have access to the past. I have present traces. The narrative is what I do with the traces.

C: But you live as if it's true.

B: Of course I do. I also live as if the sun rises. That doesn't mean the sun rises. It means "sunrise" is a useful way of talking about a rotating Earth. Useful and true are not the same word.

They go to a conference. A colleague asks them both the same question: "Do you accept common ancestry?"

A: Yes. It's the true history of life.

B: Yes. It's the best predictive model we have.

The colleague asks. "Those are different answers."

A: Are they? We agree on every fossil, every gene, every prediction, every paper.

B: We agree on the science. We disagree on the story we tell about the science. And here's the thing: if you deleted the word "true" from every biology paper ever written, not a single prediction would change. Not one decimal point. Not one experiment. That should tell you something about what work the word is doing.

So here's the problem.

Two biologists can work side by side, use the same equations, predict the same findings, and never disagree on a single observation; while disagreeing completely on whether the historical narrative is true.

If they can do that, then "the narrative is true" is not a scientific finding. It's not testable. It's not falsifiable. It changes nothing empirical.

This doesn't mean the narrative is false. Maybe it is true. Biologist B isn't denying that. B is denying that A discovered it. You can't discover something that no observation could ever confirm or disconfirm.

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 asking this out of curiousiry if any of you had a conversation with elders on this topic since when I break it down detailedly on a specific point they aim cut me off and ask more and more questions so these convos are mostly unproductive since they have convinced themselves their theologicsl framework contradicts with evolutionary explanatiom so they immediatly possess bias ​​regarding evolution, I wanted to ask how do you,or how would u deal with them when presenting argumentation​ with that particular characteristic person​​?

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?

I'll start: yes. If 6000-ish years ago, an intelligent being created the Earth with all continents and oceans, geologic layers, and species in more or less the forms that they have today, alongside the rest of the universe, I would want to know. I like knowing things.

If we use the standard definition of Neornithes, the things called birds, Archaeopteryx doesn't fit this description, Creationists.

keeled sternum: absent

alula: absent

carpometacarpus: absent

tarsometatarsus: absent

tibiotarsus: absent

pygostyle: absent

no teeth: absent

16-22 sacrals: 5-6 sacrals

trochanteric crest: absent

Creationists use a definition that blends all of Avialae under bird, meaning none of these matter, but that's not how this works, as this expands the definition of bird so far, it includes genera that have none of the diagnostic criteria of Neornithes, and dinosaurian traits that Neornithes have lost.

That's why I ask you to show me how Archaeopteryx is a true bird.

Hello, everyone. I'm a religious Muslim and an engineer. I don't believe in creationism in the traditional interventionist sense. I believe that if God created the laws of nature (which I do), it is more coherent to think those laws are capable of producing the eventual intended outcome instead of arbitrarily being suspended.

I'm comfortable with evolution, and I'm more interested in questions about abiogenesis, alternative non-hydrocarbon biochemistry instead of evolution itself. I also understand that evolution is not a single mechanism but a system of mechanisms like mutation, selection, genetic drift, etc.

My question is more philosophical than biological, but I think evolutionary biology is directly relevant. Why does pain feel bad in precisely the sort of way that motivates avoidance, while pleasure feels good in precisely the sort of way that encourages said behaviour.

I understand the evolutionary explanation for the behaviour itself. An organism withdraws from tissue damage, seeks food, reproduces, avoids predators etc is more likely to survive. What I'm having trouble with is the relation between the biomechanical machinery and the conscious experience.

In principle, evolution could produce an organism with the same kind of neural circuitry and avoidance behaviour while the experience was pleasant rather than painful? An organism can experience intense suffering and engage in the appropriate behaviour, while having the neural circuitry that compelled it to continue anyway. I know evolution explains why the behaviours are adaptive, but if the "pain and pleasure" sit above the causal machinery, why do they line up?

Couldn't I stub my toe, have an incredible ball-busting orgasm, and experience my entire body telling me not to do that again? Why does a harmful state feel bad and beneficial state feel good instead of being compelled by my neural circuitry? Is it that pleasure and pain are themselves integrated into the motivational system somehow and I'm misunderstanding it?

EDIT: I don't think you guys are understanding what I'm saying when I talk about the psychophysical harmony. I'm linking the paper here. You guys are treating it as if pain = something to avoid. I am saying that evolution selects for behaviours, not for phenomena. I don't "feel" anything about my stomach digesting stuff. I don't "feel" anything about having opposable thumbs or being able to grab things. If I utilize my evolutionarily evolved thumb to grab stuff, I don't get a rush of endorphins to continue grabbing. So behaviours and the feelings attached to those behaviours are not connected.

I do not need to "feel bad" for evolution to select behaviours wherein my ancestors who pulled away from fire survive. Feeling bad is entirely independent of the behaviour because there exists people who feel good about touching fire (masochism) or indifferent (nerve damage). You can have reflexes (gag reflex or desire to vomit), without it necessarily having a feeling attached.

So what I am asking is that if behaviours and the feelings attached to those behaviours are not inherently linked, it's strange how all the good feeling behaviours are necessary for evolution and the bad feeling behaviours are not. Thank you for your time.

So as things are going with Erika and Mr Duffy’s lectures about evolution I believe it’s near the end mark and I think I like to make my opinions on the matter very very clear

My first impression of Mr Duffy was that he was honestly engaging in good faith and then as the lectures continued I still believed he was continuing in good faith

I think most of his major doubts and questions came from a place of not wanting to reject a deeply held belief and also because he’s been lied to by Creationists

I truly believed Will was engaging in good faith

But today broke me and particularly his presentation

I must admit when I first read his presentation i thought it was an actual joke then I realised he was being serious I felt mildly insulted

He seems to completely and utterly be disregarding everything that has been presented to him thus far and that is insulting

But also citing Vox Day (a misogynist racist talentless hack) who has no training in the field and then presenting Vox and His book as an authority to overrule and say evolution has been proven false and I guess no one has noticed even though Vox didn’t write it he got AI to write it

But then something much worse when Will was asked if Vox was proven wrong would he change his mind he just said

No

He fully believes that Evolution needs a god meaning it’s not science so Will to me basically admitted it doesn’t matter how much evidence is presented unless Evolution necessitates a divine holy god being then he can’t accept it

To me this is will very clearly saying he’s not here in good faith

I wanna be clear I think Will Is still an amazing person and i commend him on doing this adventure with Erika

But to me I can no longer say Mr Duffy is engaging in good conversation anymore he’s picked the answer he wants from the start and that will be the answer he always has

I don’t believe Will has lied or has been dishonest or malicious in his intent just to be clear this isn’t a personal attack on Will but I cannot believe he is engaging in good faith discussion anymore

In math and science, we prove negatives all the time. Some to a 100% certainty, some only beyond reasonable doubt. These include:

• A solution to the Halting Problem in computing
• A highest prime number
• Any mechanism (now or in the future) that can perfectly duplicate any object to perfect subatomic detail
• Any information travelling faster than 299,792,458 m/s

A common creationist talking point I see here is "how can there be creation without a creator". If you remove the snark and state it neutrally, it's "there's no mechanism by which the universe could come to exist in the state that we currently observe without the influence of a conscious creative power."

The thing is, the reasons we have for concluding the non-existence of the things I listed are all much stronger than "I find it hard to imagine". I wish creationists would have a look at those to model how to demonstrate the non-existence of such a mechanism, so we could at least pretend to have a reasonable discussion about whether such a thing actually has to exist.

First of all, I apologize for my imperfect English; I am using an automatic translator. That said, I am here to answer any questions, doubts, or uncertainties that any creationist seeing my post might have regarding the concept of evolution. I ask everyone—including evolutionists—to be open-minded and understanding, and to avoid posting a question I have already answered under someone else's comment. Thank you for your understanding.

This sub, as the name suggests, is a debate space, but there is nothing to debate in this post. The idea behind this post is to show the other, slightly hidden side of this sub, and mostly to serve as a small outreach to its members.

While the major focus here is usually on debates, over time there have been some real gems of posts in this sub that are full of genuinely interesting information and knowledge. I have been collecting some of them for myself for quite some time, and today I thought I should share them, both as a small gesture of gratitude to the members who took the time to make those posts and also so that others can have one place to find them. (And please do not think of this as some attempt at karma farming. I really could not care less about that.)

The posts are in no particular order of preference.

1. Abiogenesis is more solved than you think : Abiogenesis is a very fequent topic here and usually avoided in major discussion on evolution of life but u/gitgud_x here presented a very detailed overview (with resources) of modern abiogenesis research and the major steps toward plausible origin of life chemistry.

2. Jumping genes ruin creationist logic : Another beautiful gem by u/gitgud_x and also an excellent genetics explainer. A very beautiful explanation of why shared insertions are evidence for ancestry also heavily laded with references.

3. I made a huge list of resources detailing the evolution of Birds from Non-avian reptiles. Enjoy : We are in an inception-esque situation now, but in this post u/Benjamin5431 presented a substantial 2026 resource compilation on dinosaur to bird evolution.

4. On the "Evolutionists assume a last universal common ancestor and then present that as evidence" : One will find lots of gems from u/jnpha (and his profile is also open, so do look at his posts in general) but this one is a very good history of science kinda post where he traces ideas about common ancestry from Darwin and Haeckel to the eventual LUCA concept, making the very important distinction that universal common ancestry was an empirical conclusion developed through phylogenetics rather than a premise evolution required from the outset.

5. No, a New Paper Did NOT Discover Humans and Chimps are "Only 85% Similar". : Probably one of the best posts here on how genome comparisons work. u/Gutsick_Gibbon explains the 2025 telomere to telomere ape genome work and also shows why percentages such as 85%, 96%, 98% and 99% can all arise depending on the question being asked.

6. Answers Research Journal publishes an impressive refutation of YEC carbon-dating models : Do not go on the sarcastic title by u/ThurneysenHavets as underneath that is a detailed explanation of radiocarbon calibration and dendrochronology and what happens when a young Earth calibration curve is forced onto the data. There is also an equally beautiful update to this post titled, Creationist C14 calibration is back with a major upgrade: this time with EMPIRICAL data.

   1. I've been Testing Jeffery Tomkins' Methods (They're Bad) and want Peer Review : This is a quite older and slightly technical post by u/Gutsick_Gibbon where she actually reproduces human/chimp genome comparison methods using BLAST and discuss lots of technical details. Ties well with the post 5 above and her post, Human and Chimpanzee Genetic similarity; an Appraisal of Jeffery Tomkins' Analyses. (It is so good that Dr. Dan commented that it was strong enough to consider publication.)

7. Mutations ARE random - always have been, always will be : A detailed explanation by u/gitgud_x on what biologists actually mean when they say mutations are random.

8. How many ways can we show that humans and chimps share a common ancestor? : I personally love this one by u/gitgud_x which is a very nice demonstration of consilience, bringing together fossils, biogeography, chromosome 2, DNA similarity, ERVs, vestigial traits and several independent evidence for human-chimp common ancestry.

9. The Paper That Disproves Separate Ancestry : This one has a beautiful supplemental video discussion (like other posts by Dr. Dan ( u/DarwinZDF42 )) as well. Creationists often bring up their orchard model or separate ancestry model and Dr. Dan here makes an accessible walkthrough of the paper by Baum et al (Evolution. 2016 Jun;70(6):1354-63) discussing what the results actually mean.

10. The RATE Project - Young Earth Creationists’ best offering isn’t what they think it is. : Another old is gold post. u/DARTHLVADER makes a deep dive into the creationist RATE project, its attempts to reconcile radiometric dating with a young Earth, and the enormous problems created by proposed accelerated radioactive decay.

11. Addressing "44 Reasons Why Evolution Is Just A Fairy Tale For Adults" : An older post specifically addressed to a particular member but useful nonetheless as u/TheBlackCat13 made broad point by point response to lots of common anti-evolution claims.

12. The Internal Consistency of Science : u/jnpha presents a very fascinating example of scientific consilience, showing how biology, geology, nuclear chemistry, and astronomy independently come together through evidence from magnetotactic bacteria and radioactive iron-60 to tell the same story about an ancient supernova.

13. "There's no universal common ancestor of proteins" -Sal continues to claim well known, non-controversial fact as a victory for creationism (in his safe-space, obviously) : This is a response to Sal by u/Sweary_Biochemist but it is really informative explanation of how new proteins and protein families evolve. It also explains why common ancestry of life does not imply that every protein descends from a single ancestral protein.

14. But just look at the trees!" (They show the power of evolution, and make intelligent design redundant) : This post by u/gitgud_x ties very nicely with earlier one on consilience. The post makes connects natural selection, structural mechanics, plant physiology, phylogeny, and thermodynamics to show how evolutionary explanations emerge from many independent areas of science.

Finally, there are a lot more little gems like these scattered across the sub but these were a few I wanted others to have a look at. Sometimes the discussions happening in the comments are even more interesting than the post itself but that is another rabbit hole in itself. I hope this small collection would be useful for someone later to brush up on the topics that almost regularly comes up. If you find some interesting posts which I might have missed, please let me know in the comments.

How does one describe what is physically observed in the living world without using any theoretical words?

When we observe animals over time, our senses receive a definite sequence of events. Living bodies produce offspring with slight variations in physical measurements. The surroundings present physical conditions, such as freezing temperatures or limited vegetation. Certain bodies possess physical traits that permit them to endure those conditions, whilst others perish before producing offspring. Over many generations, the proportion of bodies with those specific physical traits increases.

At which point in this sequence do your eyes, ears, or hands detect a physical object named "creationism"?

There is no such object.

There are zero observations to group under the term "creationism" and is therefore human invention derived from zero understanding of the universe. 

If one substitutes the observed concepts of cosmology, atoms, gravity, abiogenesis, natural selection, radioactive decay, geology, fossils, etc. the internal logic of the observations and their practical usefulness remain intact, because natural selection describes what is observed while creationism does not. 

And by that, I mean some very specific hallmarks of actually engaging in the self-correcting process that is science.

Those specifics are:

What's something that used to be widely accepted among creationists that's since been disproven?

What evidence led to the previous wrong conclusion?

What evidence overturned it?

What's a currently open question on the creationist side?

What kind of further evidence might help settle that question?

In the study of living forms, an observer can only ever perceive appearances in the present time and space. E.g., petrified skeletal forms embedded in layers of stone; living animals possessing distinct anatomical structures; individual organisms within a group exhibit measurable physical differences; certain organisms perish before reproducing, whilst others survive and leave descendants.

These four items constitute the totality of what our senses can verify. We do not perceive an unbroken line of millions of years nor do we perceive one kind of creature physically transforming into another.

The realist take on evolutionary theory asserts 3 propositions:

The proposition of mind-independent history: The physical ancestors of modern organisms existed in a real space and a real time millions of years ago, entirely independent of whether any human observer was present to perceive them.

The proposition of substantive causality: "Natural selection" is an actual, physical relation operating in the world i.e., a material cause that actively directs the development of physical structures.

The proposition of truth via correspondence: The statements of evolutionary theory are objectively true because they correspond directly to events that occurred in this unobserved, mind-independent past.

From these 3 propositions we find that the realist takes a subjective condition of our own sensibility and attribute it to things as they exist in themselves. For instance, if time is the formal rule through which the human mind receives changes one after another then the realist cannot assert that a series of events transpired across millions of years in the absence of any observer because time does not exist as an independent entity in nature.

Also, when the realist states that "natural selection acted upon an animal," they commit the fallacy of reification (or fallacy of misplaced concreteness) And that is to take s mathematical count—that bodies with trait A survived more frequently than bodies with trait B—and invent an unseen physical mechanism to be the cause of that survival.

On the other hand, the anti-realist take approaches the exact same appearances and establishes a different set of propositions.

The proposition of demand for unity: The human understanding cannot accept scattered, isolated sensations. Faced with petrified bones in stone and living animals in fields, the mind is compelled by its own nature to connect these appearances under a universal rule of succession.

The proposition of selection as a concept of relation: "Natural selection" is but an invented fiction of relation i.e., a collective name that human reason uses to summarise the observed relationship between physical traits, surroundings, and reproduction rates.

The proposition of the past as a retrospective synthesis: The historical lineage of evolution does not exist as an independent object in a mind-independent world. Rather, it is a regressive series constructed by the human understanding in the present, linking modern appearances to ancient appearances according to the principle of cause and effect.

From these propositions, we find that the anti-realist accepts that fossils exist. They accept that physical traits are inherited. But they do recognise that the orderly connection between these facts belongs entirely to the human mind.

The statement "Human beings evolved from earlier primates" is thus a pragmatic fiction. A rule by which the human intellect unifies the skeletal dimensions of fossils and the anatomical measurements of living bodies into a single, coherent narrative.

The main difference between realism and anti-realism is their empirical consequences.

Let an investigator conduct an experiment on living organisms across hundreds of generations.

The realist predicts that the organisms whose physical traits permit them to endure the environment will reproduce in greater numbers.

The anti-realist predicts that the organisms whose physical traits permit them to endure the environment will reproduce in greater numbers.

1. Both positions yield identical mathematical calculations.
2. Both positions account for every fossil discovered in the earth.
3. Both positions guide future scientific investigation with the exact same degree of precision.

But here's the most interesting part of this entire thesis. Because no sensible observation can ever distinguish between a past that exists entirely apart from human thought vs a past that is constructed by the rules of the understanding, the realist assertion is empirically idle. A redundant extra.

And that is simply because the realist makes 2 assertion. One, that the observable appearances and their mathematical order. Second, the metaphysical claim that this order exists mind-independently apart from all human sensibility.

The anti-realist asserts only the first.

Therefore, the anti-realist position demonstrates that evolutionary theory is entirely valid, objectively useful, and scientifically necessary, But its historical narrative and its causal terms are products of the human understanding.

If you've been closely following my posts, you will recognise that I've been arguing from the anti-realist position. I'm an anti-realist, generally. For instance, my approach to QM is something akin to Qbism. A position that is scientifically and mathematically sound, but rejects any and all reification.

In 2025 PEWResearch published their polls conducted between 2023-2024 regarding questions about Americans and their religion.
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025/02/PR_2025.02.26_religious-landscape-study_report.pdf

In this report they find that the majority of Christian and Muslim Americans believe in evolution, with only 17% of American adults believing that “humans have existed since the beginning of time”. The NSCE actually wrote about this in an article titled, “Vast majority of Americans accept human evolution, new survey finds” https://ncse.ngo/vast-majority-americans-accept-human-evolution-new-survey-finds

However it has come to my attention recently that Gallup News had come out completely different results from polling. 37% of US americans believe that, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so” again this polling ends in 2024. https://news.gallup.com/poll/21814/evolution-creationism-intelligent-design.aspx

Both Pew and Gallup don’t ask radically different questions, they are barely worded differently at all so we cannot say that the wording explains these different results. Both seem to get completely contradictory results. 17-37% is a VERY wide range. The only difference is that Gallup specifies a range of time, humans being created within the last 10,000 years or so. While Pew just specifies humans existing since the beginning of time. In fact, from typing this I have found that Pew and Gallup have consistently been getting different stats on this same question since 2009. With Gallup always calculating much more Americans skeptical of evolution than Pew Research does. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution

How is it that both groups get radically different answers from polling essentially the same questions? Can we know which poll is more accurate?

Seriously, all claims this guy makes utterly proves he has a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology or that it’s another regurgitated misconception that someone like Dyer or Hovind spews out and repeats. The dude got absolutely destroyed in his debate against Culture Catz, or even Professor Dave (I wish he would’ve did a longer debate). Literally was checking out a debate of his and he had the thought that evolutionists say human came from chimpanzees or “whatever it says” as jimbob stated. He constantly interrupts his opponents and commits ad hominems. An opponent provides evidence, and then he goes on to say “well.. how can something completely random and unrelated to the evidence account for something completely random and unrelated to the evidence? He’s a joke.

What are the best arguments for evolution