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Evolution vs. Creationism
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So far in this series, we have discussed creationist talking points regarding cosmology, planetary science, and abiogenesis. This brings us to a point in our cosmic timeline where life is evolving and thriving, much to the distaste of creationists. How do populations of organisms change over time to produce different types of organisms? What is evolution and how do creationists misrepresent it? This is going to be the bulkiest installment of the five,
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as it is truly the crux of the issue for creationists, so let’s dig into it. To kick things off, let’s highlight the creationist challenge that is the most hilarious, the most stereotypical, and the most flawlessly representative of their ignorance regarding evolutionary processes: If we come from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? No sentence could be uttered that could more immaculately demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire
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field of biology, so let’s use this as a starting point for explaining how evolution actually works. First, evolution does not propose that individual organisms suddenly change into something new. Some creationists pretend evolution suggests that a singular organism can suddenly sprout wings or fins or legs and just morph into some other animal. This is preposterous. Biology is not Pokemon. Evolution also does not suggest that one organism will give birth to a completely
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different type of organism, especially from one extant organism to another different extant organism. It does not say that an iguana should give birth to a buffalo, or anything ridiculous like that. No type of animal alive today begat any other type of animal that is alive today, and modern monkeys are not ancestral to humans. Evolution describes gradual morphological change, over enormous time spans and thousands or even millions of generations, within populations of
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organisms, according to evolutionary lineages that are well understood through the fossil record. This change is not sudden, it’s a gradient. Look at this strip where blue slowly becomes red. Blue is one species and red is another species. Every pixel in between is an organism. Each pixel is practically indistinguishable from the ones on either side. But this very slow change eventually produces different colors. The precise point where a new species emerges is unclear
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and perhaps even somewhat arbitrary, but also irrelevant because not all of these intermediary organisms survive. We label different species according to populations of organisms, as they diverge and isolate and further differentiate. A gradient like this is occurring on every single tiny branch of the phylogenetic tree of life. Species determination is something humans do to categorize living organisms. Nature does not care about our terminology. It just produces more life.
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Even more preposterous than creationists who think that one individual organism should produce a completely different individual organism, like a crocodile giving birth to a duck, there are those who think that transitional species should be hybrids of the two, split at the middle, like the famous crocoduck proposed by two clueless creationists. The idea that some offspring should be one species above the waist and another as of yet non-existent species below the waist is
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one of the most idiotic notions ever conceived. Halfway between blue and red is not a rectangle made of one blue square and one red square. It’s purple. It’s a blend of attributes. Of course even that is not a flawless analogy, because we already know of the colors blue and red. As life evolves it does not have specific forms in mind. But if we look back at a lineage after the fact, we can indeed see the intermediary aspects of certain features, as limbs transition from fins
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to legs when tetrapods evolved, or from legs to fins when whales evolved. Those who pretend such transitional structures are impossible are objectively wrong on multiple accounts. The fossil record clearly shows their existence, but beyond this, such structures can be seen in extant life. Just take a look at any walking fish, such as the mudskipper. It’s literally a fish that walks. This is a real thing that exists today, and it is precisely the type of
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organism that creationists are totally oblivious about. It isn’t that transitional species in the evolution of tetrapods looked exactly like this, it is simply proof that organisms with morphologies that allow for some swimming and some land-based behavior are very obviously possible, since here they are, for all to see. This is an important point to make. Young Earth creationists don’t understand the notion that most species that ever existed are already extinct, nor
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do they have an understanding of the full scope of the many millions of species that exist today. To them, the animal kingdom is precisely as it is described in their book of myths. There are cows, bears, elephants, giraffes, about a dozen others, and they call it a day. So to them, evolution must be suggesting that one of these animals either morphs into or gives birth to another one of these animals. This is genuinely what they are imagining in their minds when someone mentions
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evolution to them. In reality, species that are alive today all exist on totally separate branches of the tree of life. Humans did not “come from monkeys”. Modern monkeys and modern humans share a relatively recent common ancestor. We share a common ancestor with gorillas and chimpanzees that is even more recent, as we are more similar to them than to monkeys. We share a common ancestor with all other mammals that is more distant. And another one with all tetrapods that is even
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more distant still. All fish, more distant still. All animals, more distant still. All fungi, more distant still. And all living organisms on Earth, as distant as can be. This would be called LUCA, the last universal common ancestor. Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukarya, the three domains of life, are all related if we go all the way back to this ancient unicellular organism. So what did this process look like in the forward direction? Starting with LUCA, this reproduced and offspring
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diverged, developing different metabolic functions, like photosynthesis and aerobic respiration. Endosymbiotic events later occurred wherein some of these prokaryotic cells engulfed others, developing a mutual benefit and becoming a single eukaryotic organism, and this is where the kingdoms of life diverge. Photosynthetic eukaryotes developed into plants, other eukaryotes developed into animals, and so forth, once multicellularity evolved. Looking
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at the animal kingdom as a whole, basal animals differentiated and formed countless branches on the tree of life, which over the past 800 million years or so have stretched from simple sponges to all the animals we can see today, which actually represent less than one percent of all the species that have existed over time. This is what was proposed by Darwin over 150 years ago, and the primary evidence of this is the fossil record which has grown more and more complete
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every year since the study of paleontology began. All of these branches show slow and stepwise morphological change, gradually leading to new forms and thus new taxa within the tree. With this understood, we can knock out a bunch of creationist talking points in rapid fire. Again, humans did not come from monkeys. Homo sapiens, which is us, evolved slowly from a lineage of other Homo species, and Australopithecines before them, and a number of other genera, until arriving
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at the common ancestor of humans and other apes which lived around 7 to 9 million years ago. That’s right, humans are apes. The common ancestor of apes and monkeys was farther back, around 25 to 30 million years ago. Biological anthropologists and primatologists have gathered an incredible number of specimens outlining this whole process, which can also be done for any other lineage on the tree. So expecting evolution to allow an organism on one branch to jump to
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some other branch is totally nonsensical. Nature doesn’t do that. Furthermore, evolution is not some set plan with certain goals in mind. Nature didn’t intend to produce any particular species, nor would the exact same thing occur today given the same population of ancestors. So asking why some evolutionary lineage from the past doesn’t continue to occur today doesn’t make any sense, particularly as those more basal species don’t exist any longer, and in the case of
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monkeys producing humans, it never happened in the first place. That’s what makes this question so hilarious. Beyond the absurdity of thinking that modern monkeys are somehow the direct ancestors of humans, it’s the idea of evolution being some mandatory gate that funnels every single organism of a species up to the next level of some intended and pre-determined evolutionary pathway. In reality, small changes occur within populations of organisms, and subpopulations then diverge,
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creating two different branches which then develop independently. It should be noted that when creationists are skeptical about certain events we outlined a moment ago, you can point them to modern observations that corroborate all of these steps. Endosymbiosis is not merely hypothetical, it has been reproduced in the lab. An algal cell engulfed a bacterial cell with the capability of metabolizing atmospheric nitrogen, and this became
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an organelle of the larger cell, which we call a nitroplast. The emergence of multicellularity has also been observed, with a unicellular algal species evolving multicellularity under observation. These processes are not speculative, they are well-substantiated. The grand scale of all these lineages is instead corroborated by the fossil record, which we will get to a bit later. While different types of creationists have different opinions on evolution, Young Earth
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creationists reject the entire concept of common descent. They believe all species were created more or less precisely as they are, and they believe that they were brought two by two onto a huge ark by Noah to survive a global flood, after which they proliferated to yield all the animals we see today. This notion is so profoundly absurd it’s difficult to even know where to begin. First, as we mentioned, the perception of the animal kingdom this requires is infantile. There are
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not merely a few dozen animal species. It’s not lions and elephants and a few others and that’s it. There are millions of animal species, perhaps even tens of millions. The sheer biomass that would be present on the ark would require it to be substantially larger than any ship ever built even in modern times. And that’s just to physically fit the animals on board in a compact manner. Then what would happen? What would they eat? The mass of food required would be far greater than
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the biomass of the animals, requiring the ark to be even an order of magnitude larger still, especially if we want to actually separate the animals so they don’t eat or murder each other. Some creationists try to solve this problem by claiming there were far fewer types of animals at the time of the flood. So instead of thousands of species of beetles, there was just one, and the diversity of beetles we see today was produced from that point forward. The same
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would go for the variety of feline species, that lions and tigers and cheetahs and pumas and ocelots and jaguars and housecats all diverged after the flood when animals began to repopulate. And the same for mice and rats and hamsters and gerbils, and so forth. This is even more ridiculous than the idea of millions of species on one boat. These creationists refuse to believe in gradual evolution over millions of years, but they will believe in ultra-rapid evolution over
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a few hundred years? Many of these animals were known in antiquity, so the diversification had to be almost instantaneous. So creationists adopt an exaggerated and physically impossible version of the process they are specifically denying in order to cling to this ridiculous myth of the ark. Regardless of which version one adopts, there are many more absurdities that arise once the flood is over. How did the two penguins get all the way to Antarctica? How did the kangaroos get
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to Australia? How did all of the animals get to their ecological niches, leaving no trace of themselves anywhere else? What about all the plants? Most of them would die in a global flood, yet they’re everywhere. What about freshwater aquatic life? That would all die out as soon as their habitats mixed with salty ocean water. Furthermore, two organisms of each species do not have enough genetic diversity to produce large, healthy populations, so how does that
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work? Both for animals and for humans, who supposedly descended from one man and one woman not once but twice. And the list goes on. The most common response to all of these issues is typically magic. How did all the animals find the ark and then get back to their habitats after the flood? Magic. How did Noah prevent them from eating each other on the ark? Magic. How were their progeny not cripplingly inbred? Magic. When you believe in a magic deity,
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it is acceptable to propose magic as a solution to any problem. In such a case the only recourse is to remind creationists at every opportunity possible that they are believing in magic. Let’s now pivot to paleontology and the fossil record, because this is the primary line of evidence that substantiates everything we are describing. All of these lineages on the tree of life are immaculately supported by the millions of fossilized specimens that have been found,
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which can be accurately dated to specific time periods and which populate all of these branches, thus elucidating the forms which have existed in the past, as well as their gradual morphological change. Of course the fossil record is not perfect, because fossilization is a relatively rare occurrence. We will never have fossils for every single species that has ever existed. But if we are doing a very large jigsaw puzzle, we will be able to tell what the picture
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is without every single last puzzle piece. First of all, what is a fossil? A fossil is the preserved remains of an organism or some kind of evidence of its behavior that is found in rock, soil, or amber, that is over 10,000 years old. These can be very large, if preserving a large animal, or they can be very small, preserving even microorganisms. The reason these are rare is that dead organisms tend to decay very quickly, so this kind of preservation
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occurs during relatively uncommon events. The organism must be rapidly covered by sediment, so it might become buried by the sea floor, or lava, or tar. Once trapped within sediment, the body does decay, but bodily particles get replaced by minerals, especially in hard parts like bones, teeth, or shells. Once the organism is gone, its precise form remains preserved for us to find, so we can gather highly detailed information about their morphologies, and more. This is the
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most common type of fossilization and it works well with bony animals, but other processes can also occur, like insects getting trapped in resin or amber. This is one way that we can find the remains of soft-bodied organisms that don’t fossilize well. There are also trace fossils, which unlike the body fossils we just described, preserve the behavior of organisms. This would include things like footprints or burrows. Paleontologists study all of these fossils
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to learn about what kinds of living organisms lived, and when. Finding remains of aquatic animals in the middle of a desert tells us there was once water there, and so forth. And there are numerous methods of dating fossils, including radiometric dating as most are aware, but also electron spin resonance, thermoluminescence, and others. There is nothing speculative about the dates that we assign to fossilized remains. Creationists have many issues with fossilization,
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of course. First, they pretend fossilization should be impossible because geological processes are so slow. This is ironic, considering the lightning fast rates of sediment deposition they pretend are possible for the generation of post-flood geological structures. But nevertheless, as slow as sediment deposition typically is, other processes can be very fast. Rivers can flood suddenly. Tidal waves can occur. Volcanoes erupt. There are many violent processes
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that can rapidly bury organisms. These are not a daily occurrence, but over hundreds of millions of years, there are plenty of opportunities for burial and later fossilization by these means. Additionally, there are even slow methods of fossilization. Animals decay because of bacteria, but there are swampy anoxic regions where bacteria that decay organisms can’t survive, so animals can be slowly preserved as they are buried by sediment at a more typical rate. The same can be said
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for deoxygenated ocean basins, where decaying bacteria and larger scavengers can’t survive. Then of course the biggest problem is that creationists are in complete denial as to the extent of the fossil record. Way back in Darwin’s time we didn’t have a lot to work with. That’s why he explicitly stated that the success of his theory would hinge on whether paleontological evidence of transitional forms would be discovered. Over 150 years later,
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we have plenty to work with. The number and variety of specimens we have found is staggering. To present an exhaustive list of transitional species would require an entire series of videos unto itself, so we will not do that, but simply googling “list of transitional species” is enough to keep one occupied for days. Rather, we can highlight a handful of important ones to illustrate precisely why these specimens so remarkably substantiate evolution.
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Look at Ambulocetus. This is an early amphibious cetacean from a little under 50 million years ago, so this is along the lineage that produced modern whales. The transitional nature of its morphology is immaculate. It was able to walk on land roughly like a sea lion, and it swam somewhat like an otter, using its limbs as well as undulation for propulsion. It did not have a tail like whales do,
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but it may have had webbed feet. This is where Ambulocetus sits on the family tree in comparison to modern whales. And of course there are many other transitional species along this lineage ending with whales that we could look at, such as Basilosaurus, from around 40 million years ago. This is quite different from Ambulocetus, being that it was an early marine mammal, and it was fully aquatic. But we still see the intermediate morphological features that would lead to whales.
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We should make one thing clear at this point. In a certain sense, every species is a transitional species. There are no evolutionary dead ends apart from mass extinctions. Life is always changing. Some organisms fit an environmental niche extremely well, so if that environment changes very little, then certain forms can persist with very little change, such as with sharks. Shark diversity has grown incredibly over hundreds of millions of years, but there are certain
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sharks today which are very similar to ancient sharks, although smaller. But for the most part, change is always occurring. We say transitional species when referring to extinct species present on lineages that produced extant species. This is the difference between what paleontologists refer to as stem groups and crown groups. A crown group includes the most recent common ancestor of all
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the currently living members of a group plus all its descendants. A stem group includes exclusively extinct species that existed prior to the crown group and which do not share all the features of the crown group. There are species that are alive today that will one day be extinct, and they may at that point be considered transitional species from the perspective of scientists in that time. It is not the case that there are certain, special, perfect forms that are somehow the
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goal of evolution, and inferior species that have to be traversed to get from one perfect form to another. It’s just what has existed in the past and what exists today. Ambulocetus is not inherently inferior to modern whales, there are many factors that go into extinctions, and one day whales will go extinct as well. But we can use the fossil record to understand how it is related to other mammals, and other animals in general. It is the case
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that the closest living relatives of whales are hippos. This does not mean hippos are ancestors of whales. It means that hippos and whales share a common ancestor that is more recent than the common ancestor of both hippos and whales with other mammals. Going backwards on the branches that led to hippos and whales would show us an ancestor with a totally different morphology, and distinct populations of this species produced different branches which diverged dramatically
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over tens of millions of years. This is one of the main concepts that creationists do not understand, and need to be taught with clarity. Those who resist this information use a number of tactics. First, they will simply deny the existence of transitional species. They can do this in a dishonest way by discussing the time of Darwin. They will exclaim that Darwin admitted that the fossil record posed a huge challenge for his evolutionary theory, because he did
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not see sufficient transitional species. And this is true of the 1860s. It is no longer true today, not by a longshot. For those who dare to examine this from a modern perspective, no matter what types of specimens are collected, or how many, they will refuse to accept them as being truly transitional. They will pretend that any fossilized organism must have been a version of what exists today. This means they will insist that there are no transitional species between
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land mammals and whales, no matter how ignorant this proclamation is regarding the anatomy of the organism. Similarly, all hominid remains are either chimps or humans. All Australophithecines, all Homo species, they’re all either a chimp or a human, no matter how inconsistent that assignment is with the specimens, which very clearly display intermediate morphologies, with some more basal characteristics, like longer arms, and some modern characteristics, like bipedalism. It
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doesn’t matter that every single biological anthropologist in the world would attest to the absurdity of this claim, creationists will deny the existence of these distinct species. In this particular realm of hominid evolution, there are a few tropes that creationists bring up all the time, so let’s go through them briefly. First, they are obsessed with Lucy, the first substantial specimen ever found of Australopithecus afarensis. It was about 40%
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complete, and allowed us to prove that these apes were bipedal, due to some very clear anatomical characteristics pertaining to the skull, pelvis, and knees. Creationists desperately pretend that this is the only Australopithecine specimen, which is far from the truth. We have hundreds, many of which are far more intact than Lucy. But they will try to poke holes in Lucy and pretend she was a chimp in order to discredit hominid evolution. They will also say that there was a
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baboon bone found in the specimen, so it’s just a baboon. It’s actually true, decades later it was determined that one of the bones belonged to a baboon, not to Lucy. This means nothing beyond that. One of the bones did not belong to Lucy, the bipedal Australopithecine, but rather to a baboon. That’s the end of the story. They will often bring up the Nebraska man. This was the name given to a putative hominid species based on a tooth that was found in 1917.
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By 1922 it was realized by the scientific community that it actually belonged to an extinct peccary species, which had been severely weathered such that it resembled a hominid tooth. This was a misidentification made by a singular paleontologist who specifically warned that it was not definitive proof of a hominid, but creationists pretend this singular mistake somehow invalidates all the hundreds of hominid specimens that are clear as day.
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They will also bring up the Piltdown man. This was a paleoanthropological fraud where bone fragments were presented by an amateur archeologist as belonging to an early hominid species. They were accepted for a while in Britain, but debunked just a few years later by the wider anthropological community. Creationists again use this singular incident to try to deny the entire field of biological anthropology, neglecting to acknowledge that it is simply an instance of fraud that was
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exposed by the scientific community itself. In the end, this is all creationists can do, make a fuss over nothing to deflect from an entire field of science they don’t want to exist, because we have firmly substantiated dozens of hominid species between modern humans and our most recent common ancestor with other apes, and there is not a single honest and educated person in the anthropological community who would pretend that all of them are somehow
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just chimps or people, due to the undeniable intermediary characteristics they possess. Another thing creationists do is they fixate on remaining gaps in the fossil record. This is for two reasons. First, they know, just as paleontologists do, that the fossil record will never be 100% complete. It is not likely that every single species was fossilized, and it is even less likely that we would find them all. They’re hard to find. That does not
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prevent us from filling in the fossil record thoroughly enough to make evolution and common descent consistent beyond reasonable doubt, just on the grounds of the fossil record alone. The other reason they do this is to use numbers in a tricky way. Let’s say there are two organisms, A and B, and the transition between them is a mystery. There is a gap in the fossil record. Then we find organism C, which immaculately fits the description of a transitional species between
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A and B. But what’s this! Now there are two gaps. How did we get from A to C, and from C to B? Then we find organisms D and E to fill those two gaps. Now there are four gaps! Things just keep getting worse and worse. Of course this is preposterous, filling in gaps like this corroborates an evolutionary lineage, and in the limit of hundreds of transitional species, the morphological gaps become smaller and smaller, such that to doubt their representation of an evolutionary lineage
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becomes more and more unreasonable. But creationists are not reasonable, so this is the game they play. An example is the transition from dinosaurs to modern birds. Archeopteryx was discovered way back in 1861, and presented as a feathered dinosaur along a lineage from raptors to birds. This was not enough for creationists, which is fair enough, but since then, countless other forms have been found more clearly outlining this lineage from two-legged dinosaurs to modern birds.
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The gradual change in morphology that can be seen is quite striking, and in fact, if one stares at an ostrich for long enough, the resemblance to dinosaurs like raptors is actually quite obvious. The real difference is the feathers, which evolved very easily from dermal placodes in a manner similar to scales, as they are both made of keratin. In fact, there is a point mutation that can occur in certain chickens that causes them to grow feathers instead of scales
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on their legs and feet, which makes them look pretty funny. Additionally, ectopic expression of the regulatory genes Spry2 and β-catenin in embryonic alligator skin produces bud-like structures that resemble avian long feather buds. These are just examples of how trivial it is to explain these types of changes, like scaly dinosaurs producing feathered birds. But we will discuss genetics in the next installment. Looking further at the fossil record as a whole,
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it presents enormous problems for creationists of all varieties. First, for those who believe that these specimens were deposited rapidly during sedimentation after a global flood, things get absurd very quickly. Of course these are dead organisms that were not on the ark, so they were all alive at the same time, died at the same time, and were deposited at the same time. The idea that all of these organisms were deposited into specific layers so flawlessly
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becomes a statistical impossibility. With regard to the Phanerozoic Eon, trilobites are present exclusively in the deepest layers and no others. Dinosaurs are in the middle layers and no others. Hominid remains are in the top layers and no others. Every type of organism is present in a narrow range of strata, which just happens to delineate gradual morphological change from basal forms to modern forms. Creationists make transparently desperate
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attempts to explain the distribution. One such idea is hydraulic sorting. They pretend the fossils are organized according to physical features like mass and buoyancy. This is ridiculous, as there is simply no correlation. Ammonites are very light and buoyant but they are present only in the bottom layers, because they are so ancient. Turtles are dense but are in the middle to higher layers. We can also look to discrepancies within forms. Trilobites
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come in a wide variety of sizes. Shouldn’t they therefore be spread out amongst the layers? But they’re all at the bottom. There is no physical characteristic that can possibly determine how these fossils were deposited simultaneously into very specific layers all around the world. Another strategy is to pretend that the separation depends on behavior. As the flood began to occur, marine animals remained towards the bottom since they were already underwater, slow moving reptiles
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who couldn’t run to higher ground got caught in the middle, and of course fast humans are at the top because they ran up some hills. This might trick children, but it becomes ridiculous once you broaden the scope. Why are marine mammals way up towards the top? Weren’t they swimming with the ancient sharks? Why are flowering plants up towards the top as well? Can trees run? There is clearly no broad correlation of this kind. So apart from the complete impossibility of
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sediment deposition happening so quickly in the first place, the idea that fossils would happen to coincidentally sort into the precise layers that coincide with evolutionary predictions, with no exceptions, is beyond ridiculous. It is abundantly clear that fossils exist in layers that correspond to time periods in which they were alive. There is no other explanation. So the creationist reaction
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is often then to simply lie about what we have determined scientifically. They look for anomalous geological features and pretend that they disprove all of paleontology. This would include thrust faults where rock layers are pushed up due to tectonic activity, so as to appear to be younger than they really are. Creationists present this as specimens in younger layers than we would predict. But any geologist can easily match these strata with other occurrences of the same strata as
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they normally occur, and the fossils line up just fine. Also in some cases these uplifting events fold sections of strata upside down, seemingly reversing the order of the strata, but we also find things like animal burrows upside down in these strata, as though they dug up instead of down. These are clear indicators that the strata have been inverted by some geological process. And the fact remains that anomalous data, even when unexplained, which these features are not, still
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would not be enough to negate the overwhelming patterns we see in the fossil record. At a certain point creationists have to simply pretend that paleontologists and geologists are lying. This is as weak a defense as can be imagined, but it does work on some people, so it’s the way they have to go. Scientists are evil, so just ignore all scientific data. If not the scientists themselves, then the fossil record is a trick from Satan, or even a test of faith from god. The notion that
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such a gaslighting Ashton Kutcher-esque deity is all-loving or worthy of worship is rather comical. At the very least they just pretend that geological methods of dating are wrong, referring to an imagined tautology. The relative dating of strata is used to date fossils, and the fossils are used to date the layers, so it’s circular and unreliable. This is not the case, relative and absolute dating methods are completely different and they routinely corroborate each other. In the
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end, Young Earth creationists would have you believe that in 6000 years, over 99% of all life died, was rapidly deposited in sediments, and magically sorted itself into strata that couldn’t possibly have formed that fast and in a way that immaculately lines up with evolutionary principles even though evolution didn’t happen. It’s quite a leap of faith to say the least. In reality even a small child can understand that if we dig into lower strata, we go back in time,
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and we see things that are increasingly dissimilar to what we see today, along smooth morphological gradients that trace clear lineages over countless transitional forms for both plants and animals, that emerged and went extinct at certain times which match large-scale ecological events that are also well-substantiated. As bad as this all is for creationists, it gets even worse when you consider biogeography. This is the field that examines the geographical
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distribution of fossilized remains. As we already mentioned, certain forms are found exclusively in certain regions. This is obviously because they evolved in those regions. But creationists want us to believe that they walked from there all the way to the ark and then back, leaving no trace anywhere else. But we also now know due to plate tectonics that the continents were once all together. Combining predictions in geology with predictions in paleontology, if we know where
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the continents were once connected, and species that were around at that time, we should find the remains of those species in regions that are now nowhere near each other. This is a powerful prediction that was later confirmed, as we found remains of the same species in places like Western Africa and Eastern South America, as these once touched. This is what good science does, it brings
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together many different observations and explains them with a single model. That’s what evolution does to explain the sequence of fossilized remains as well as their locations, both stratigraphically and geographically. Everything fits precisely as expected, and in complete defiance of any expectation that creationists could have. For more elevated criticisms from intelligent design proponents, rather than lying about the existence of fossils or the geologic time they
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clearly outline, they will instead complain about portions of the fossil record that show morphological change which they claim is more rapid than evolutionary processes can explain, thus implying divine intervention. Of course the premiere example of this is the Cambrian explosion, which was a radiation event in which many new body plans first emerged. The dishonesty is more subtle here than with Young Earth creationists, but it is dishonesty
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nonetheless. First, they are always lying about the time spans. If they can get away with it, they won’t list any timeframe at all, taking advantage of the connotation of the word explosion to make it seem like an instantaneous event. If pressed, they will say that it lasted 5-10 million years. Not so instantaneous anymore. But that is still a rather large lie. The truth is that this name can hardly be pinned down to a singular radiation event, so the term actually applies to
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more like 30-40 million years, or even up to 80 million years according to some paleontologists. Furthermore, while it is true that many new body plans emerged, there are animal forms that seamlessly traversed the boundary between the Precambrian and Cambrian, so it is a far cry from the implication that all animal life suddenly exploded into existence. We can say the same for any other such radiation event they try to discuss. They are lying about the timeframes and
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the idea that there were absolutely no precursors to the forms that arose. Speaking more generally about the rapidity of speciation, they will fixate on terms like punctuated equilibrium, which describes periods of more rapid change. First, creationists will pretend that this describes all of evolution, when evolution often occurs very gradually. But for the more rapid periods of change that do occur, they pretend that there is no mechanistic explanation. We will
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see how this is not the case when we discuss molecular biology, such that there is plenty of time for evolutionary principles to operate. With the fossil record covered, let’s cover some more problems creationists face when trying to view the variety of life from a biblical lens. First, the people who wrote the bible were completely clueless when it comes to biology. Those who believe the bible was written by god are worshiping an allegedly omniscient god that
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had a practically non-existent understanding of his own creation. Leviticus 11:19 and Deuteronomy 14:18 say that bats are birds. They’re not, they’re mammals. Leviticus 11:20-23 says that some insects have four legs. They do not, they all have six. The book of Jonah refers to a whale as a big fish. Whales are not fish, they’re mammals. Genesis 30:37-42 says that goats make spotted babies in the presence of striped sticks. What? These are the writings of pre-scientific men
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with a tenuous grasp of the world around them. This becomes even more clear with the terminology that creationists tend to use. Creationists do not refer to phylogenetic taxa like kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. They just say “kinds”. They do this because the bible says kinds. At first glance this seems intuitive to someone who knows nothing about the animal kingdom. Dogs are a kind. Cats are a kind. Different kinds. But what about wolves?
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Are dogs and wolves the same kind? What about foxes, where do those fit? Are house cats and tigers the same kind? Creationists differ in how they answer such questions, and they desperately hold on to the imprecision of the word kind for obvious reasons. On the ark, there were two animals of each kind. So if kind means species, all the problems arise of how the millions of kinds all got on there and stayed fed and alive. If kind refers to some larger taxonomic branch,
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like a genus or a family, then the problem arises of how we got from those animals to the enormous diversity of animals that exists today in a few hundred years. Kind never meant anything, and it still doesn’t mean anything, but it is used to deliberately obfuscate scientific principles. When they say that organisms only bring forth of their kind, and therefore evolution is impossible, again
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they are being deliberately vague. If kind means species, they are simply wrong. We have observed speciation events. We have physically observed a subpopulation of organisms diverge and generate a new species that is not interfertile with the original population. We have seen this for plants, like Spartina anglica, and Tragopogon mirus, as well as animals, like the fruit fly Drosophila
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paulistorum and the marbled crayfish Procambarus virginalis. Additionally there are ring species, like the Californian Ensatina salamanders, where a series of populations of organisms are connected by a geographic ring that represents a slow spreading out of a species, where two paths diverge and meet, or one path makes a full loop. The populations on both sides of the ring are interfertile with their immediate neighboring populations, but where the two arms meet up again,
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those populations are unable to interbreed. Enough time has passed and enough change has occurred during these slow radiations that what was once a single species has become different species. Of course in response to this, a creationist would say that kind does not mean species, those are just different types of salamanders, so they are all in the salamander kind. Therefore kind should be thought of as meaning genus, or even family. But then there is no problem in terms
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of what is brought forth, as any new species will continue to belong to the same greater taxa, so it is an example of organisms bringing forth of their kind, and also an example of new species arising due to evolution. This “kind” could be the primate kind, or the mammal kind, or the vertebrate kind, or the eukaryote kind. No matter what branching event we identify on the tree of life, there is
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a taxon that encompasses everything that results from that point forward, and thus qualifies as a singular kind. Humans and chimpanzees are both of the ape kind. Humans and elephants are both of the mammal kind. Humans and sharks are both of the vertebrate kind. Humans and trees are both of the eukaryote kind. Everything is the same kind if you take kind to mean any taxonomic label imaginable, so everything does indeed bring forth of its kind, and also evolution is true.
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This is one of the key things that creationists need to understand. Evolution operates in terms of nested hierarchies. Wherever branching occurs, we identify specific clades, and all the descendants of a particular common ancestor are part of the clade, and will continue to be part of that clade forever in the future. That’s why humans are technically primates, and tetrapods, and even fish. All land animals evolved from bony fish, diverging around 400 million years ago. We
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do not refer to ourselves as fish, rather we use the name Osteichthyes. This is the clade that includes all bony fish and all tetrapods. We’re in there. It is simply that we tend to define ourselves by more recent taxa, namely the genus and species, Homo sapiens. If populations continue to diverge and significant speciation events occur, we need new taxa, so we simply create new labels. It’s like nested folders in your computer. Within one large folder, like the animal kingdom,
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you can have many smaller folders, like all the different phyla. Each of those can have folders as well, which might be subphyla, or classes. Things can get very complicated and messy, but the hierarchy is always there, and if the documents in a folder become too numerous and diverse, you will likely create some new folders to further organize your documents. The same goes for phylogeny, which in the end is an arbitrary system of classification invented by humans.
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Things get trickier when considering interbreeding. Sometimes different species can interbreed. A horse and a donkey can make a mule. Typically such offspring are infertile. But sometimes they are fertile. Wolf/dog hybrids, bison/cattle hybrids, various birds, it absolutely can happen. Creationists would say that this challenges the biological definition of species, and with some justification. The definition can’t be applied flawlessly without exception, it’s just
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a guideline. Nature does not care about the words we use, it does what it does. But our inability to trap nature in our attempt at rigid categorization is in no way evidence against evolutionary principles. Populations diverge, sometimes retaining the ability to interbreed, sometimes losing that ability. It depends on the degree of divergence and the amount of time elapsed. Of course no matter what you tell a creationist, they will likely stick to their guns and say we’ve
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never seen life go all the way from a fish to a monkey. And of course they’re right. That took several hundred million years, and apart from the absurd timeframe, the odds of seeing that exact evolutionary lineage happen precisely as it did an additional time is like rolling ten million dice, marking the result, then rolling them again and expecting to get exactly the same result. It’s a
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statistical absurdity. But in general, that much change takes a really long time. That’s why we look to the fossil record to see what has already happened. Dogs and cats are different kinds, right? Well take a look at an extinct group of Carnivorans called miacids. They have primitive characteristics of both dogs and cats, like carnassial teeth. This is because these animals gave rise to both dogs and cats. Very close to the split between the two clades,
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differentiating members of one side from members of the other becomes very difficult. Take, for example, Cryptoprocta. This is on the feliform side so it’s more cat-like than dog-like, but the distinction is not trivial. Similarly, take a look at Moeritherium, one of the earliest ancestors of elephants, and Pezosiren, one of the earliest ancestors of manatees. They look very similar, having similar stocky bodies with short columnar legs, both having lived in freshwater bodies and
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consuming underwater plants. In general, such distinctions become more vague as we go into the past, closer to the common ancestor of two clades. This evidence is absolutely insurmountable. That’s why some creationists resort to simply denying anything they are told about past organisms and the fossil record. Once again, it’s all lies from the devil. They want to see something happening
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today, with their own eyes. Well very few can deny what humans have done with artificial selection. Unlike natural selection, which typically takes a very long time to produce significant morphological change, artificial selection can be quite rapid because it is guided by sentience. We can breed dogs in a deliberate way to rapidly enhance any arbitrary characteristic. All dogs were once like wolves. But we identified small differences and molded dogs into the breeds
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we see today, with an enormous range in size and behavior. We’ve done the same with plants in the form of crops. Virtually nothing in the produce section of the grocery store is natural, it’s all of human invention. We take things like Brassica oleracea, the wild mustard plant, and breed generations selectively with the intent of amplifying certain features of the plant. The result is broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts. These look very different,
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but they all came from the same thing. Creationists will say a dog is still a dog and Brassica is still Brassica, but that’s not the point. Look at the degree of morphological change we can induce in just a few hundred years. The dog breeds are largely interfertile because we continue to forcibly breed them. But there would be a limit to this, which may arrive some time in the future, where we end up having to distinguish radically different breeds as different species.
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They certainly can seem that way, or they would if you had never seen a dog before. But of course creationists will not be satisfied, they want to see entirely new body plans. They want to see a dog sprout wings, or fins, or additional limbs. First of all, this is not a reasonable request. All primates, for example, have the same body plan. Technically, all mammals have the same body plan, just with significant modification. Speciation doesn’t require a whole new body
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plan. Humans and gorillas are obviously different species, but what is fundamentally different about us? How much more significant are the differences between humans and gorillas than the differences between dramatically different dog breeds? Certainly more, but not that much more. Beyond this, organisms can indeed develop additional limbs or new types of limbs very quickly, but this will require molecular biology to explain, so we will get there in the next installment.
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To continue briefly on this thread, we should elucidate some related creationist terminology. Creationists will sometimes try to seem scholarly by acknowledging that some evolution does occur, but in limited fashion. It is only variation within a kind. They will call this microevolution. Large scale evolution, or macroevolution, which creates totally new kinds, remains impossible. First, these are not scientific terms, at least not in the way
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that creationists use them. The only mention of them in the scientific literature is from Russian entomologist Yuri Filipchencko, who used the terms in a 1927 paper to distinguish between genetic change below the species level vs. above the species level, but this was written in a time when it was thought that all speciation requires macromutations, which we now know is not true. So creationists are the only people who use these terms, for the most part. But more importantly,
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as we just alluded to, the processes that result in all of these types of organismal changes are the same processes. Pretending that you can have a little evolution but not a lot is like pretending a leaky faucet could fill up a bucket but not a swimming pool. In reality, the faucet could fill up the Pacific Ocean, it just would take an incredibly long time. This is nothing but an ignorance of evolutionary mechanisms. Pivoting to another important demostration of
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evolution that creationists deny, we can discuss vestigial structures. Just as beneficial traits are selected for, traits that are no longer as useful tend to generate evolutionary pressures for their diminishment. But of course it is almost impossible for them to disappear without a trace, so we end up with tiny vestigial structures that are not a significant drain on energy resources,
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but represent what once was there. For example, whales have pelvic bones where lower limbs used to attach on their land-dwelling ancestors. It would be bizarre to think that a designer would give whales hip bones but no legs, yet it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution. Creationists will desperately cling to minor ancillary functions of vestigial structures and pretend those validate their existence in the context of design. Whale hip bones have some minor influence
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in reproductive behavior, but this does not negate the vestigial status. They do not do what they once did. It does some other minor thing, since nature is resourceful and makes the most of what it is working with. We can say the same thing for the remnants of leg bones in snakes, the human appendix, and more. To summarize, designating something as vestigial does not mean it is functionless, even though every creationist will bring up minor functions for vestigial structures
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in an attempt to disprove its vestigial status. Now you can correct them. Beyond this, there are plenty of functionless biological structures. Humans have auricular muscles for moving our ears, like all other mammals. Just the way that most cats and dogs can move their ears to point towards sounds, we have those muscles too. And while a few people can wiggle their ears as a party trick, we can’t actually aim our ears anywhere, despite the muscles for this function still existing,
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and even attempting to function when stimulated by sound, they are simply too weak to do anything. Their function has been completely lost. With that we have covered some important ground regarding evolutionary biology and paleontology. Helping creationists understand phylogeny and the tree of life is one of the most important things one can do to help them see what evolution actually proposes, rather than the cartoonish mischaracterizations that preachers promote,
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like porcupines magically morphing into fiddler crabs. But we have a lot more to cover still, because the real ammunition in obliterating creationist propaganda arrives when we dive into genetics and molecular biology, so let’s head in that direction next.
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