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0:10
As most of you are aware, I have been debunking creationists for quite some time. In fact, at this point I am familiar with just about everything that they say, from the most clueless preacher to the most sophisticated and well-funded propaganda peddler. Because of this, I thought it would be worth my time to create an in-depth series debunking virtually every creationist talking point, which others can use as a handy resource. Instead of focusing on debunking specific
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creationists, this series will focus on the things they collectively say. So the purpose of the series is not to expose anyone in particular, but rather to arm the viewer with the ability to immediately discredit anything a creationist says. You may find this useful if you are going to debate a creationist, or if you have a creationist in your family and you’re tired of their misinformed lectures over dinner. Whatever the case may be,
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if you need a handy guide to combatting creationists, this is the place for you. Now before diving in, we should quickly note that there are different types of creationists. Let us define and organize them, in order from most unscientific to least unscientific. First up we have scriptural literalist flat earth geocentric creationists. They reject literally all science and pretend that Earth is a little terrarium made by their deity. To justify this they reference
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bible passages like Psalms 93:1 which says the Earth does not move, Revelations 7:1 which references the four corners of the Earth, and Genesis 1:6 that references the firmament, a solid dome over the Earth. They believe the Earth is a few thousand years old, populated by creatures whose forms are precisely as their god created them. This is the absolute bottom of the barrel. Next up are your standard Young Earth creationists. They are very similar to
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the previous category but they don’t believe the Earth is flat. They still take everything else directly from scripture, namely that everything was created by their god in six literal days, around 6000 years ago. They sometimes make a meager effort to reference certain aspects of geology and other sciences to justify this belief. They are shockingly numerous. Next is Gap creationism. This puts a time gap between the first two verses of genesis,
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so as to propose that the initial creation of everything occurred, and then many years later there were the six days of creation to produce the living organisms we see today. This is just a bit more scientific because it allows for an older universe and Earth than Young Earth creationism, so they typically don’t dispute certain aspects of geology and astronomy. Day Age creationism is similar but proposes instead that the six days of creation are not
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literal days but periods of unknown length, possibly millions or even billions of years. This again is an effort to make creationism compatible with geological and astronomical time. Next is progressive creation, which posits that there were many separate creation events over time. This is an attempt to explain the fossil record through the lens of creationism, thereby accepting that many forms trace a clear lineage through the paleontological record,
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but that divine intervention is responsible for this proliferation rather than natural processes. So it accepts aspects of biology and paleontology in addition to astronomy and geology, while denying most of evolutionary biology in particular. Next there is intelligent design. Ideologically similar to progressive creation, it is a political movement spearheaded by the Christian propaganda mill called Discovery
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Institute that arose due to a backlash towards the previously utilized term, “creation science”. Intelligent design is a rebranding campaign that attempts to intellectualize creationism, avoiding negative connotations of shifty preachers to present itself as scholarly. To do so, they tend to be the most accepting of select scientific principles, such as geological time, common descent, and many other concepts that are firmly rejected by Young Earth creationists, but
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nevertheless remain firmly pseudoscientific when it comes to molecular and evolutionary biology, claiming that naturalistic principles are incapable of explaining the complexity and variety of living organisms. I have an entire playlist specifically debunking the figures in this organization should you find yourself wanting more detailed information about this propaganda. Wrapping up there is theistic evolution, which is more or less accepting of evolutionary principles
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but maintains that a deity sporadically intervenes and has a plan for the whole thing. And finally there is deistic evolution, which essentially proposes that there is a deity which determined the fundamental characteristics and physical constants of the universe, triggered the big bang, and then played no further part, thereby accepting purely scientific and naturalistic explanations for the origin and diversity of life. As we can see, this spectrum ranges from denying
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essentially the entire body of scientific knowledge to really not denying any science whatsoever, with the singular uniting thread being some kind of deity with some measure of intent for our existence. Positing the general existence of a deity is a philosophical position that can’t be firmly proven or disproven in any empirical manner, so this series will make no attempt to do so. Instead, we will be focusing on the firmly established scientific
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principles that creationists deny to one degree or another. Obviously some of the discussion will apply more broadly to all categories, and some only to Young Earth creationists, as there are things which that ideology denies that intelligent design proponents do not deny. But we will attempt to go over virtually everything that all of these groups propose, and how to expose the dishonesty behind them. This series will be broken down into five parts,
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according to the following topics. This will allow things to remain roughly chronological in terms of the history of the universe, the emergence of life, and its proliferation all the way until the arrival of humans. It will also allow us to stay relatively cohesive in terms of subject matter, so that we are not constantly jumping from one topic to another as gish galloping creationist preachers tend to do. So let’s start things off by covering all the talking points
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spanning from the beginning of the universe up until just before the beginning of life on Earth. Chronologically speaking, first we can discuss the beginning of the universe. Contrary to common understanding, science does not have any ability to discuss this concept. Big bang cosmology is a highly successful model that describes the development of the universe from an initial singularity. It does not describe how that singularity came about, or what existed before it,
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if that is even a question that means anything. So all creationist rhetoric about science suggesting that something came from nothing is totally without basis. The very beginning of the universe is not understood by science, so this is not really even a scientific discussion, and we will return to it in part five to describe some philosophical implications of this question. But once again, taking the initial singularity for granted, the evolution and development of
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the universe is very much within the domain of science, so let us begin to discuss that instead. Let’s examine the most ridiculous arguments attempting to discredit basic knowledge in cosmology and astrophysics. Many creationists deny big bang cosmology because they do not understand it, and deliberately misrepresent it. Young Earth creationists in particular tend to picture a kablooey graphic with fully-formed planets and comets tumbling out, which indeed would
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be preposterous. Of course this has nothing to do with actual cosmology. Keeping things as brief as possible, out of the initial singularity emerged pure energy, which quickly congealed into matter, a plasma of quarks and leptons, which over subsequent epochs formed baryons like protons and neutrons. From unthinkably high temperatures the universe rapidly cooled, and a few minutes after the initial singularity there was a brief period called big bang nucleosynthesis,
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where it was cool enough for protons and neutrons to exist but still hot enough for them to fuse, just like they do inside stars, and that’s where lots of helium nuclei and some lithium nuclei formed. A few hundred thousand years later it was finally cool enough for nuclei to couple with electrons, allowing neutral atoms to form, and all this matter had been collecting into gas clouds by gravitational influence all the while, continuing to do so now as atomic matter
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for millions of years. When enough hydrogen gas collects and compacts into a small area, the immense gravitational pressure triggers fusion and a star is born. This was the era when stars and galaxies first formed. The most massive ones burned through their fuel the most rapidly, producing heavier elements. When they died in massive supernovas they created all the rest of the heavier elements, and spewed this material out into the universe. This collected again and
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formed other stars, this time with diverse enough material that planetary systems could form along with stars in protoplanetary disks. Our solar system formed in such a manner about ten billion years after the big bang, and our planet Earth was part of that system formation. That was an incredibly abbreviated and oversimplified account of much of the field of astrophysics, so please visit my tutorials on astronomy and astrophysics if you
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would like much more detail on these processes as ammunition against creationists. But again, they tend to not have even heard any of the above information, so their arguments against big bang cosmology are typically ridiculous. They will say that if everything emerged from a big explosion, everything should be moving in the same direction outwards from the explosion, so how are certain things moving towards each other, like specific stars and galaxies? How
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is it that Venus exhibits retrograde rotation, spinning the opposite direction of all the other planets? One need only specify that, apart from the big bang not being an explosion, our system formed ten billion years after the big bang due to totally unrelated processes, and that in general stars didn’t form for about 200 million years. Typical responses from Young Earthers are always saturated in incredulity, asking how it is that we could know anything
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about these phenomena. In such cases you can try your best to explain everything in greater detail, and some may even be willing to learn, but most won’t, so it is often easiest to simply point out that they are making an argument from incredulity, which is always a garbage position to take. Do they understand how their iPhone works? No. Is it therefore magic? Of course not. One can also
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make it clear that astronomy is perhaps the most observational branch of science, as we can simply look through telescopes and see what’s going on in the universe. We can see protoplanetary disks, we can observe star formation in various stages within nebulae. We have a profound understanding of stellar dynamics and where the elements come from. We use spectroscopy to analyze the composition of stars, and to see which molecules are capable of forming in
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the vacuum of space. Encourage them to visit their local observatory and make their own observations, and to ask questions that the employees will be thrilled to answer. Most will refuse, which says a lot about the willful nature of their ignorance, which you may point out to them. Pivoting from incredulity regarding well-substantiated science, more intelligent creationists will bring up what is called the fine tuning argument. It applies
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to the physical parameters of the universe as understood by science, so it does not support Young Earth creationism, but could be a seen as supporting deistic evolution, at least at face value. The universe has a number of physical constants, or quantitative values pertaining to fundamental characteristics that one might propose could potentially have had totally different values. These would include the fundamental unit of electric charge found
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on the electron, the ratio of the mass of the proton to the mass of the electron, the magnitude of the strong nuclear force, the gravitational constant we refer to as big G, the cosmological constant that determines the rate of the universe’s expansion, and several others. It is often said by creationists that if any of these parameters differed from their current values by even a few percent, that life would be impossible, and in some cases star formation or
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even atom formation would be impossible. The question becomes: Why do the parameters have values such that all of these things can arise, including life? Creationists will posit that it is because a creator ordained them to be so. There are some obvious objections that can be put forward immediately. First, we have no way of knowing that these constants can indeed possess any arbitrary value, or even any value other than they currently have. The values may be much more
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constrained than we can currently explain, or they may even have existed for some initial time period in some kind of superposition of multiple values, with a particular set of values subsequently coming to dominate for one reason or another. Beyond this, the narrowness of the range of values that permit life are often overblown by creationists. Many have tolerances of an order of magnitude or more, not the fraction of a percent that is typically proposed by those making this
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argument. It should also be stated that some other totally different set of parameters could have led to completely unimaginable structures, which led to life in some totally different way. It just wouldn’t have looked anything like us, as it would be made of some other particles that don’t even exist in our universe. Furthermore, without a complete understanding of quantum physics, it is impossible to know how many of these constants are truly independent. It could
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be that there is only one such constant that all the others depend upon in some way. One constant coincidentally allowing for life is much more statistically acceptable than a dozen or more. It also seems a bit strange that a universe so finely tuned for the explicit purpose of life would, as far as we are aware, take over ten billion years for life to emerge and in so few places so as to be undetectable from our vantage point, perhaps even indeed in only one place
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among an endless universe of emptiness sparsely spotted with structures totally inhospitable to life. If the purpose of the universe was life, there should be a lot more life. Other explanations have also been put forward, such as the potentiality for a multiverse, meaning many universes, each having a different set of physical constants. Just as there are trillions upon trillions of planets, with sentient life potentially on very few, pondering why their
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planet happens to be able to harbor life, there could be just as many universes, with sentient life only around to ponder the parameters of its universe in those universes that can harbor life. This is known as the anthropic principle. Observations can only occur in universes that permit observation, as nobody is in the universes that do not permit life to speculate about why that is the case. However, the notion of many universes is rather speculative ad hoc reasoning
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with no empirical basis, so it is not the best argument against the fine tuning proposal. Suffice it to say that it is an interesting thing to think about, evoking notions not just of a potential deity, but even our universe as a programmed simulation made by some other technologically superior non-deities. As deistic evolution is by far the least unscientific version of creationism, it is not important to dwell upon, so we can continue with creationist talking
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points that specifically contradict science. Going back to specific aspects of big bang cosmology, some creationists will learn basic astrophysics terminology in an effort to pretend they can refute scientific methods for determining the age of the universe. It should be made clear that the accepted value of 13.787 billion years plus or minus 200 million years is supported by a mountain of empirical evidence from multiple lines of inquiry. First, this can be derived from
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measuring the expansion of the universe through the red shifting of galaxies as a function of distance. Sources of visible light that are moving towards an observer are blue shifted, meaning the waves get bunched up, while those moving away from an observer are red shifted, meaning the waves get stretched out, just like how an ambulance will have the sound waves from its siren pitched up
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while approaching you and then pitched down once they pass you. The farther away the galaxy is, the greater the red shift, which tells us how much the universe has expanded since that light was emitted, and this data can be plotted to get something called the Hubble constant. The reciprocal of the Hubble constant will give us an estimation for the age of the universe. Then there is the ratio of hydrogen to helium in the universe, which is about
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3 to 1. That there is so much helium indicates that the universe was once hot enough to fuse protons and neutrons, which is explained by the nucleosynthesis aspect of the big bang model. No other model can account for this observation in general, and they certainly cannot account for this precise ratio that is specifically predicted by the duration of the nucleosynthesis epoch as demanded by the model. Finally there is the cosmic microwave background
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radiation, something which was specifically predicted by big bang cosmology and then subsequently observed. This is a perfect blackbody spectrum permeating the cosmos, which is a remnant of the recombination epoch, when electrons first coupled with atomic nuclei and relaxed to the ground state, emitting photons and causing the universe to become transparent for the first time. This occurred 380,000 years after the initial singularity, and since has been
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stretched out by the expansion of the universe to measure 2.7 Kelvin with extreme isotropy, meaning the same in every direction. This isotropy indicates that it was generated during a time of thermal equilibrium, something which only makes sense in the context of big bang cosmology, which had predicted and estimated this radiation to be around 5 Kelvin, prior to its detection. These lines of evidence and others all agree and corroborate
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the universe’s age as understood today. Some creationists accept big bang cosmology because they like how it superficially resembles the creation event in genesis, described by the verse “let there be light”. Young Earth creationists tend to reject all of this because if they accept the findings of astrophysics, they have to then accept the long astronomical time spans and specific sequence of events that refute their biblical literalist
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worldview of a six-day creation, so they look for ways to try and disregard all of this data. Creationist claims regarding problems with big bang cosmology are typically just lies about what we can or should observe. For example, the first stars that formed are now called population III stars, which were predominately short-lived, and whose supernova remnants collected to form population II and then in turn population I stars. They can be differentiated by their metallicity,
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or the proportion of elements other than hydrogen and helium that they contain. They will say something like: where are all the population III stars, why can’t we see them anywhere? Of course the model proposes that they are predominately long gone, so they should for the most part only be detectable in galaxies that are so far away that the light we receive from them was emitted in a time when population III stars were still around and dominated their galactic landscape. In fact,
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recent observational evidence for population III stars has been collected in distant quasars, it’s simply very difficult to collect such data and has only been possible rather recently with the most sophisticated space-based telescopes. So essentially, creationists will distort the timeline of cosmic evolution and pretend we should see things we know we shouldn’t typically be seeing, and then wonder why we aren’t seeing them. More primitive thinkers will not even address such
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concepts but exclaim that explosions out of nothing are silly, totally mischaracterizing the big bang, which again, was not an explosion at all. Additionally, big bang cosmology does not offer any explanation for the cause of the initial singularity, only the development of the universe beginning around a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the initial singularity. So once again, all remarks resembling “you believe something came
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from nothing” are completely misguided. Big bang cosmology says nothing whatsoever about anything coming from nothing, or how the initial singularity came about. It is a highly successful model describing the development of the universe. Moving on, in terms of determining how far away things are within the universe as it is today, there are different methods available to us. We can measure the parallax angle of a relatively nearby star, or its shift in apparent position
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as Earth orbits the sun. We can use cepheid variables, a particular type of star that pulsates in a reliable way, so we can determine distance by observing luminosity. Type 1a supernovae are what we refer to as standard candles, since they too have a reliable brightness, and they are so vibrant that we can see them clearly even in other galaxies. These objects are very far away, often millions of light years, so for their light to have reached our eyes,
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they must have existed for at least that many years. To combat this, Young Earth creationists will say things like the speed of light must have changed over time, having once been much faster to make up for the large distances. This is of course totally unfounded, not only without empirical basis but also in direct violation of special relativity which is very well-substantiated. Some may instead claim that the star or galaxy was created simultaneous to its light already in
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transit to us. Whenever creationists use such ad hoc conjecture, they should be called out for it, and pressed to admit that it is not scientific, and reeks of desperation. Continuing on to planetary science, we can make similar remarks about the age of the Earth. The accepted value of 4.54 billion years plus or minus 50 million years is well-substantiated by geology, namely radiometric dating of zircon crystals and also carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. This
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technique relies on the instability of certain types of atoms, which gives them the tendency to decay, whereby they emit a high energy particle that can be detected. Specific atomic nuclei can be unstable for specific reasons. Some have a proton to neutron ratio that is not ideal. Very large nuclei become unstable because the strong nuclear force that keeps positively charged protons fused together drops off with distance faster than the electromagnetic force that repels
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them, so nuclei above a certain size tend to decay by emitting alpha particles, or helium nuclei, in order to get smaller. Uranium is one such heavy element, and it is present in these meteorites, where it decays into lead very slowly. By measuring the ratio of uranium to lead we can determine the age of a meteorite, which formed during the solar system’s formation. Furthermore this can be done with two different isotopes, as uranium-235 decays into lead-206,
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while uranium-238 decays into lead-207, so utilizing both of these decay chains and comparing respective values is a great way to corroborate the age to ensure no material has leached out of the rock. These can also be cross-checked with other isotope decay chains, like samarium to neodymium or rubidium to strontium. For other objects we can use other dating methods, including one of dozens of other radioactive nuclides with totally different half-lives.
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Creationist responses to such data are typically denial and more ad hoc reasoning. They will say that decay rates have changed over time. This is totally baseless. Decay rates are based on the inherent stability of nuclides which have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of external environmental conditions. Nuclides decay at precisely the same rate in a vacuum as they do under any set of external stimuli. They will also object to assumptions regarding
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none of the daughter nuclide being present in a rock at the time of formation, but many decay chains make this assumption for obvious reasons. Take potassium-argon dating. Potassium-40 decays into argon-40, and argon is a noble gas. Noble gases are also known as inert gases because they are monoatomic. Apart from xenon, they do not make bonds with anything, so it is absolutely impossible that argon would have been incorporated into the lattice structure of any mineral in the
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rock at the time of formation. It must have been produced by the decay of potassium after the rock formed, where it was then trapped. Some pretend that carbon dating is the only form of radiometric dating, and since such dating methods are only reliable up to around ten half lives, carbon dating should only be used for objects under 50,000 years old or so, given that carbon-14 has a half life of around 5,730 years. And that’s correct,
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which is why we only use carbon dating within that range, typically for archeological remains. They are oblivious to the fact that, once again, many different radioactive nuclides can be used, with wildly different half lives, including uranium, which is one of the main ones used for the age of the Earth or other very old things. So when they ask how carbon dating can be used to determine the age of the Earth, you can simply say that it absolutely isn’t,
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and why would they think that it was? Some will ask how we can determine the half-life of nuclides when those half-lives are millions of years long. Of course we can measure decay over literally any time span, whether an hour or a week, and plug this data into an equation to determine the half life. Decay is happening all the time, even for more stable nuclides, because the number of atoms in any macroscopic sample is enormous beyond comprehension. So
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we simply measure the disintegration rate and do some math, which is quite trivial. For younger objects, instead of radiometric dating, we can look at varves, which are small rhythmic sediment deposits, as well as ice cores, tree rings, and other geological or biological features with a reliable cyclical nature. In fact, we often use one of these in conjunction with radiometric dating as a way of corroborating a date. When multiple
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techniques agree on an age, it corroborates the age beyond reasonable doubt, as the probability of getting precisely the same erroneous date multiple times is statistically unreasonable. Then when it comes to the age of the Earth prescribed by Young Earth creationists, it is absolutely trivial to demonstrate that the Earth is much older than 6000 years. The earliest archeological site we have discovered is Gobekli Tepe, which dates to at least 10,000 years ago,
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and there are even trees that are currently alive that are more than 6000 years old. Young Earth beliefs regarding the age of the Earth are based on Irish Archbishop James Ussher, who used clues from the bible to set the creation of the Earth as being October 23rd, 4004 BCE, which of course is the antithesis of proper scientific methodology. A subjective analysis of fictional mythological events does not compete with the rigor of empirical analysis which involves quantifiable
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predictions that are vindicated to high degrees of precision, and anyone who disagrees is simply not coming from a place of reason. Moving on from the age of the Earth to the age of geological features, we get to stratigraphy and the geologic column. This is something that creationists fixate on relentlessly because it so immaculately and single-handedly demolishes all of their claims. The bulk of what needs to be said on this topic has to do with the fossil record,
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so we will return to this in part three where we look at paleontology, but a bit can be said from the standpoint of geology as well. To begin, our understanding of geological processes grew quite a bit in the 19th century. We began to understand the processes of sedimentation, the rock cycle, essentially how all of these geological structures form, and that it takes millions of years. This was a huge turning point in large numbers of people rejecting biblical creationism,
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since creationists would have us all believe that structures like the grand canyon formed very rapidly after an enormous global flood. First, the existence of beaches proves that this is not possible. If sediments could be packed to form rock layers in such brief time spans, sediments would be scarce, they’d just all be rock. Second, the rate of sediment deposit to form these structures would be ridiculous, something like a meter per day. Again,
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this is not something that is physically possible, and the proof is that localized flooding does not produce any such structures. Continuing with the idea of a global flood, we can also discuss the problem of where all the water came to cover the entire Earth, since that is not a thing that exists. Even if the polar ice caps completely melted, it would not come anywhere near covering all the continents completely with water. Creationists will talk about a firmament,
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and waters from above, which is totally baseless for reasons that are obvious to everyone except flat earthers. Some talk about “fountains of the deep”, claiming they came from earth’s interior, which is too hot for liquid water to exist. Related claims involve accelerated rates of plate tectonics, which would have South America receding from Africa around 19 miles per day, and which would produce temperatures upwards of 2700oC and rocks so hot that they wouldn’t have
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cooled to ambient temperature by now. Beyond all of these impossibilities, there is no geological evidence whatsoever for a global flood at any point in Earth’s history. This is an enormous problem for anyone who believes the bible is inerrant, because a major event in the bible is known to not have happened. Some creationists will therefore make no attempt to substantiate the global flood but rather poke holes in what we know about stratigraphy. They will point to
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volcanic features that form very rapidly, not acknowledging that igneous rock formation from volcanic activity is mechanistically totally different from the formation of sedimentary rock. They are different types of rock that form in totally different ways, and the timelines are immaculately well-understood, as I explain in great detail in my geology series. But in general, creationists have no ability to make a global flood in recent history compatible
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with geology. Take something like the Green River Formation in the western United States, which records the sedimentation in a group of lakes. This sedimentation takes the form of about 20 million varves, which again are thin layers of sedimentation, in this case alternating in layers of fine light and then finer dark sediment, which respectively represent sedimentation during the summer when there was stream run-off and the winter when there was not, something we can see
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in modern freshwater lakes. This therefore took 20 million years to produce. Proponents of the global flood would have you believe that this was laid down in a time span of a few hundred days through some kind of alternating turbidity currents. This many layers over this many days, doing some simple math, would amount to at least one layer per second. This is a physical impossibility on any scale, let alone the tens of thousands of square miles the layers
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span. This feature requires geologic time to produce, there is no other explanation. There are countless other geological features, like salt deposits, sand dunes, fossilized mud cracks, raindrop prints, chalk layers like the White Cliffs of Dover, Zoroaster granite, and many more that are absolutely inexplicable by some kind of rapid post-flood deposition, so without getting redundant, we can just broadly state that the entire field of geology is incompatible with
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the idea of a global flood having produced all the features we see. That’s why there are precisely zero working geologists who are Young Earth creationists. It’s like being an astronomer who is a flat earther, which also does not exist. At any rate, we will return to stratigraphy in part three when discussing the fossil record. For now, let’s finish part one with other aspects of geology and planetary science. Creationists sometimes bring up Earth’s magnetic field as
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evidence for a young Earth. They will say that because this field is decaying at a measurable rate, around 5% per century, it can’t be more than a few thousand years old. This is profoundly short-sighted, as any geologist can tell you that the strength of the field has oscillated over geologic time, and the poles sometimes even completely swap, 171 times in 76 million years in fact. It is precisely this phenomenon that led to the corroboration of plate tectonics,
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by observing magnetic striping in newly formed oceanic crust spreading out on either side from mid-ocean ridges. This misrepresentation utilizes a common deceptive tactic, and that is to identify a temporally local trend and extrapolate it without basis. Earth’s magnetic field is generated by iron nuclides in the liquid outer core that convect and align in certain ways as Earth rotates. It is a chaotic system, which causes the resulting field
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to grow periodically stronger or weaker, and also shift rapidly, sometimes inverting completely, as the magnetic poles are in constant motion. This activity has been recorded in minerals which contain particles that are magnetized by Earth’s magnetic field and line up with the magnetic poles, such that we can easily determine the strength and direction of the magnetic field over geologic time, which clearly has not been decaying steadily but rather fluctuating
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in strength and direction. Creationists make no attempt to actually discuss this data. Not only do creationists extrapolate 150 years or so of data far into the past without mechanistic basis, they flat out ignore all data preceding the modern era. They will also try to invalidate the model for planetary magnetic field generation called the geodynamo by pointing at planets which do not have magnetic fields, such as Venus, which has a liquid core but does not spin fast enough,
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and Mars, which does not have a liquid core. So there is no contradiction with our models. A similar case can be laid out about creationist claims regarding the moon. Specifically, the moon is receding from the Earth very slowly as it orbits, a few centimeters per year. This is due to the tidal bulge on the Earth that the moon produces, which causes Earth’s rotation to slow down slightly, and this loss of angular momentum is compensated by the moon speeding up
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and moving farther away. This has been happening for about 2.5 billion years, which means that a day on Earth has been getting longer for that time period as well. Around 1.4 billion years ago, a day was only 18 hours and 41 minutes. Creationists will take this rate of recession, again extrapolate erroneously, and calculate that a little over a billion years ago the moon should have been touching Earth, so neither the moon nor the Earth can be as old as we think. However,
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this is a gravitational phenomenon, and the gravitational force between two objects depends on their masses and the distance between them. That means the rate of recession can’t be constant, as the gravitational influence changes as the moon recedes. This is confirmed with paleontological evidence regarding periodicity of the tides, which can be used to determine that lunar retreat was about half the current rate around 650 million years ago, and around two thirds of that 2.5
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billion years ago. That the recession was slower when the moon was closer makes perfect sense, given the stronger attraction, so there is no contradiction with this data, nor our figures for the age of the Earth and moon. Beyond the erroneous extrapolations, it is important to note the hypocrisy of creationists when they pretend that things like current rates of nuclear decay can’t be presumed to be consistent over long time spans,
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but then proceed to make such assumptions regarding things like changes in magnetic field strength and rate of lunar recession when it suits them. Cherry picking has no place in science. At any rate, that wraps things up with creationist talking points regarding cosmology and planetary science. Let’s move forward and tackle another big topic, abiogenesis. In part one of this series, we examined some of the claims that creationists make
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regarding cosmology and planetary science. With the development of the universe and the formation of the Earth covered, let’s now dig into the emergence of life on Earth, an event referred to as abiogenesis, meaning life arising from non-living matter. Creationists are obsessed with this event not just because it contradicts the special creation narrative that defines their relationship with their deity, but also because it is so unintuitive, and so hard to understand on a
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technical level. This makes it easy to confuse others by misrepresenting facts and appealing to emotion. Life comes from life. Everybody knows that. So how could life come from non-life? Let’s go over some concepts in physics and chemistry that will help elucidate this concept. The first thing we must do is try to understand some things about what abiogenesis may have produced. When creationists scoff at the idea that life could come about by natural processes,
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they are always misrepresenting the product of abiogenesis. Some look at the complexity of modern animals, which of course is totally insane, as can be said for any multicellular life form. Obviously the first living organism was unicellular. Therefore, some creationists will look at something like a yeast cell. This remains profoundly dishonest, as yeasts are eukaryotic, and therefore the products of endosymbiosis events
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that produced far more complex unicellular organisms than existed for the billion years prior. Some will go further and examine extant bacterial cells, since those are prokaryotic, but this is still totally inaccurate. While modern prokaryotic organisms are much simpler than even unicellular eukaryotes, they are still the products of billions of years of evolution, and are dramatically more complex than the first organisms must have been. Bacteria have structures
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like flagella, cell walls, simple organelles, and DNA-based genomes. The discrepancy in complexity from the first life to extant bacteria is about as significant as from extant bacteria to a human being, or perhaps even greater. The first living organism would have been what we can refer to as a protocell. It would have been the simplest structure that meets the requirements we attribute to life, meaning that it performs metabolism and self-replicates. This means that
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there are enzymes which are capable of promoting chemistry, and it must have had some genetic material, or information storage system, which most scientists in the field believe was RNA, not DNA. RNA and DNA are both nucleic acids, but RNA is structurally different in various ways, the most important of which is that it tends to be single-stranded as opposed to double-stranded. Because of this openness, RNA is capable of performing various catalytic functions,
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which opens up the possibility of RNA acting as both genetic material and enzyme. RNA strands would have been the first self-replicating entities, through a process called autocatalysis, which we will get to a bit later. The point is that the first protocell definitely needed RNA, it may have needed another class of biomolecule called polypeptides, and it must have had some kind of membrane to preserve its contents from its surroundings.
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There are two facets to explaining how this system can have arisen. The first is a more purely chemical domain, where we must figure out how the various biomolecules can have formed. That would mean amino acids, which are the monomers that polymerize to form polypeptides, and then ribonucleotides, which polymerize to form RNA. We need routes to the monomers, and then mechanisms by which they polymerize, or link together to form chains. Once these polymers
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formed there would have been an incredibly complex mixture, thus necessitating some kind of selection mechanism in order to produce a narrowed-down mixture of replicating biopolymers, which complexified over time to eventually produce the simplest living system. This is what is studied by the field of systems chemistry. Before we begin to elucidate these two aspects, let’s knock out a few creationist straw men preemptively. First, creationists will pretend
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that in order to substantiate abiogenesis as a concept, scientists need to create life in a lab. This is preposterous for many reasons. First, if abiogenesis occurred, then it occurred whether or not life ever produced sentience to probe its origins, or even multicellularity in general. The validity of the process was the same in the stone age as it is today. Second, we don’t need to physically recreate something in order to substantiate its existence. We have
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an enormous amount of knowledge regarding the birth, life, and death of stars, and we don’t need to build a star in a laboratory in order to substantiate what we know about stars. Third, and most importantly, creationists presume that abiogenesis, as promoted by science, involved some molecules floating together and becoming a cell in an instant. This is not the case. We can’t just stick some molecules together like a lego set and produce a living cell, because
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nature also did not do that, so the request has nothing to do with natural processes. In reality, sets of molecules exhibiting autocatalytic behavior evolved by natural selection over long time spans to gradually produce a system that could be called a living organism. In fact, the instant that such a system could be labelled life would be extremely difficult and somewhat arbitrary to define. There is a gradient called the physico-chemical continuum linking chemical
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systems and living organisms, and the boundary between the two is blurry. Life and non-life are not a binary system like heads and tails. Beyond this, creationists are fully aware that if anyone in the related but separate field of synthetic biology did truly synthesize an entire living cell from scratch, they would simply remark that only an intelligent designer could achieve such a feat, therefore god created life. It’s a lose-lose gambit designed in bad faith. But again,
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we will return to this concept of autocatalysis and systems chemistry in a moment. Offshoots of this line of thinking include the tornado in a junkyard argument. Creationists will say that life arising by chance is like thinking that a tornado could run through a junk heap and assemble a 747. As dumb as this sounds, this argument is used everywhere from science illiterate preachers all the way up to credentialed intelligent design proponents. First,
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the choice of comparing life to a manmade object is as deliberate as it is preposterous. Man made objects are known to have human designers. Of course they do not assemble any way other than how we chose to assemble them according to our design. That has absolutely nothing to do with nature. Second, this notion of simply sticking pieces together to make an object, once again, has very little to do with what science proposes. A process that was clearly both iterative and
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gradual can’t be compared to a singular event. In general, every analogy that refers to man-made objects is inherently deceptive. The implication is that humans make complex things, therefore everthing complex must have been made by someone. This falls apart immediately by looking at nature. Snowflakes are geometrically highly complex, such that their beauty can rival man-made art and architecture. However, they form by purely natural processes in the atmosphere. Therefore, an
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equally appropriate analogy would be to say that complex objects like snowflakes form naturally, therefore everything complex forms naturally. This would also be wrong, as many complex objects are designed. In the end, complexity and design just do not correlate at all. This becomes abundantly clear if we accept that complexity is not the hallmark of design. Simplicity is. An iPad does not have thousands of buttons, some of which do more than one thing, some of which do the
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same thing as others, and some of which don’t do anything at all. It has one button. It is designed to be simple and intuitive to use. The biological world is not like that at all. Nature does not plan anything. It tries everything and keeps what works. There is no goal, there is no blueprint, no function is predetermined, it is stumbled upon. Without sentience, nature relies exclusively on mutation and selection. We will later expand on this idea quite a bit,
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but let’s introduce a relevant key concept now. Here is a demonstration of how mutation and selection works in the laboratory. Say you need an enzyme to promote a particular transformation. You need 100% yield and 100% specificity, performed highly efficiently. Scientists in this position will screen some number of known enzymes, anywhere from 100 to 100,000. The odds of getting a perfect
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match are infinitesimally low. But finding one that will perform the transformation very poorly are quite high. Perhaps the screening yields one enzyme that promotes the transformation with 5% yield and 5% specificity. You take that enzyme and subject it to random mutations. Out of the hundreds of mutants, one offers 10% yield and 20% specificity. Isolate and repeat the process. After 15 rounds of this, you have your perfect enzyme. There was no design involved, simply random
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mutation and selection. This process is sped up dramatically in the lab, but can easily happen over larger time frames in nature, as certain selective pressures are in place simply by virtue of certain systems of molecules being better at self-replication than others. This is the key aspect of abiogenesis that creationists are unable to grasp, even those with knowledge of traditional organic chemistry. Nature works with complex mixtures, it does not need pristine conditions
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like those used by laboratory chemists. It makes many things, and then selection takes over, allowing certain sequences to dominate over time. We can say the same thing about living systems. They are not perfect machines. Organisms have redundant functions. With no ability to redesign from scratch, problems are fixed with band-aids. Some parts serve no function. Faulty genes are retained. Signaling pathways are so complicated so as to barely be conceivable from
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an engineering standpoint. A living organism is a mess, which makes perfect sense in the context of blind forces improving upon existing templates, slowly making them better but never perfect. Going back to current origin of life research, let us go over some basic information. As we said, we first need to get the components of life. At the very least this means RNA, which is made of ribonucleotides, and polypeptides, which are made of amino acids. Let’s start with the simplest of
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these small building blocks, amino acids. These are trivial to synthesize. They are so trivial to synthesize, in fact, that they form in the vacuum of space. Chemistry is rather limited in space, since it works much better in a confined volume, typically a liquid solution, like an aqueous solution. Neverthless, atoms and molecules do collide in the vast expanse of space and form larger molecules, including amino acids, which is proven by amino acids found on meteorites
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that land on Earth. Probes that land on asteroids in space have found other important biomolecules, such as uracil, one of the building blocks of RNA. Additionally, there are plenty of pathways to get these molecules on a prebiotic Earth. The famous Miller-Urey experiment from the 1950s took simple molecules like methane and ammonia, introduced a spark, and got amino acids. The takeaway from all
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of this is that it is no problem to get amino acids. It can be taken for granted that amino acids were abundant on a prebiotic Earth. To speak a bit further about the Miller-Urey experiment, this is referenced excessively by both creationists and science advocates. The danger for science advocates is to pretend that the experiment substantiated abiogenesis, when it really did not. It produced the most simple and tiny building blocks of life, which was a great
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achievement, but is not even remotely comparable to producing life. Science advocates must be careful to not present this experiment as more than a small, early step in this field. In turn, because it is discussed so much, creationists make it a point to try and discredit it. They will say that only a few amino acids were produced. This is false, later spectroscopic analysis of the glassware used in the experiment detected over 20 amino acids, including most of the biological
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ones, as such techniques were limited at the time the experiment was carried out. Also the experiment has been recreated countless times to great success. Next, they will complain about the conditions of the experiment, describing oxidative vs. reductive conditions, essentially referring to the presence or absence of oxygen, which would not have been abundant in a prebiotic atmosphere with no photosynthesizing life yet around to produce it. This is meritless
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criticism, as the prebiotic earth was host to a wide variety of geological niches that had a variety of oxidizing or reducing potentialities, there is no need to be limiting. Nevertheless the experiment is typically done under reductive conditions to simulate the anoxic environment, and utilizing different combinations of gases always yields interesting mixtures of organic products, including nucleobases, another essential building block. Other important biomolecules like lipids
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and sugars also have well-understood synthetic pathways, the latter of which form by something called the formose reaction. The smallest components of life are easy to form, and clearly would have been in abundance on a prebiotic Earth. There is still a bit of work to get from these smallest molecules to the monomers that must then polymerize, at least for ribonucleotides, which have three components. There is a sugar, a nucleobase, and a phosphate. A
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large number of synthetic chemists focus on this specific aspect of abiogenesis, and over the past few decades enormous numbers of viable prebiotic synthetic pathways have been substantiated for each of these components and their assembly into ribonucleotides. The specifics of these pathways go beyond the scope of this video, but for the inquisitive viewer, a mountain of primary scientific literature is available outlining them in great detail,
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some of which will be linked below. Once the monomers are readily available, they must polymerize to form RNA and polypeptides. There are a number of mechanisms available here that have been firmly substantiated. The first would be wet-dry cycling. In shallow areas like tidal pools and hot springs, there are natural cycles like day and night, as well as tides, which result in sequential polymerization and degradation. As a pool dries out,
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a chain lengthens. Once wet again there is some dissociation and new monomers can migrate to the growing chain within solution. Over many cycles, long chains can form, and this has indeed been observed in nature. Additionally, very interesting chemistry can occur on catalytic mineral surfaces. It is known that nucleotides can polymerize on hot montmorillonite clay, according to principles
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of inorganic chemistry that are also beyond the scope of this video. But this has been observed for decades, and offers another pathway for polymerization. Once biopolymers are available, collections of these polymers can get trapped in small vesicles, which results in tiny compartments within which interesting interactions can occur. Thus emerges the domain of systems chemistry. Let’s mention some creationist talking points regarding the aforementioned prebiotic chemistry.
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First, they will claim that any laboratory synthesis is not applicable to abiogenesis. They will pretend to take issue with aspects of experimental design and reagents used, claiming the reagents were unavailable on a prebiotic Earth, the equipment was unavailable, the manipulations of the flask would not have occurred, and so forth. Essentially, anything done in any lab does not count. This is highly dishonest. In the laboratory we can test what
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molecules do. If they do something in a flask, it is dictated by the properties of those molecules. They will do the same chemistry anywhere. When we measure the boiling point of some compound, it isn’t unique to a laboratory setting. It’s the temperature at which that compound boils at that particular pressure, anywhere in the universe. The lab isn’t magic, and neither is nature. We
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can’t force molecules to do things in a lab that they don’t do in nature under the same conditions. Furthermore, experiments tend to test one thing at a time. There is an aspect of prebiotic chemistry being investigated, so tangential processes using reagents that are not prebiotic are not relevant to the research question. Creationists fixate on irrelevant details to distract from the point of an experiment. They will do the same thing with experimental
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setup. If any type of machinery is used, they will cry foul. This is also short-sighted, as there are certain geochemical or geophysical processes and cycles in nature that have to be simulated in the lab. The setup is specifically mimicking natural conditions. They will also do this with certain aspects of experimental protocol, like running reactions under argon gas, or washing mineral surfaces with peroxides and deionized water. Running reactions under argon
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gas is done to prevent the reaction vessel from interacting with the atmosphere, namely all the oxygen that was not there on the prebiotic Earth. Washing with peroxides and deionized water is done to kill and remove biological contaminants, such as bacteria, that obviously also were not present on a prebiotic Earth. This type of protocol makes experiments more prebiotically relevant, not less.
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Origin of life researchers are not stupid, nor are they deceptive. They do things a specific way for specific reasons, all of which are totally lost on creationists who do not understand the first thing about running chemical reactions. And of course there are aspects of laboratory chemistry that are done exclusively for the purpose of the researcher ascertaining what has happened. When chemists isolate and purify their products, it is so that they can characterize them
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using spectroscopic techniques that allow them to figure out exactly what it is that they got, and whether it is what they expected. We can’t tell what’s in a flask just by looking at it with our eyeballs. We need specialized instruments, and we need compounds to be pure for analysis. Nature doesn’t have to do that, as nature is not sentient and doesn’t care what is happening. It makes things and just keeps going. The other thing creationists will do is invent
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the concept of “time of the gaps”, the notion that scientists suggest that given enough time, all the relevant chemistry will occur. This is an obvious attempt to shift attention away from their clear god of the gaps argumentation, but additionally, it is just more deception on their part. The claim is that molecules degrade very rapidly, so if processes require long time scales, they become impossible because reactants will not remain intact. These arguments always
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cartoonishly exaggerate or misrepresent these rates of degradation, either through ignorance or through sleight of hand, extrapolating the half life of a single peptide bond under certain conditions to an entire peptide under any conditions. They also ignore the stabilizing effect that mineral supports offer, diminishing degradation while promoting polymerization. And of course the most egregious oversight is that it is a good thing that polymers degrade, because it
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establishes an equilibrium between monomers and polymers, within which different rate constants emerge for different polymers, thus enacting a kind of natural selection, whereby some polymers form more quickly, or degrade more slowly, or are more effectively stabilized, and these are factors which result in particular sequences predominating in a statistically significant way. Going back now to our vesicles full of biomolecules, we can begin to discuss
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their interactions. Certain RNA molecules have catalytic properties, that is to say, they can do chemistry. We call these ribozymes. Some have the ability to promote peptide formation, and polypeptides in turn can also have catalytic properties, promoting RNA formation, metabolism, and other functions. With both RNA and peptides capable of enzymatic activity, an incredible array of possibilities emerges. It is important to note that long polymers are not required for catalytic
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function to exist. It is not only 200-mers, or polymers with 200 monomeric subunits, that can do chemistry. Even di- and tripeptides can have catalytic influence. And for RNA, catalytic function sufficient for self-replication emerges once strands of 40 to 50 monomers arise. A picture materializes of suites of molecules interacting in increasingly complex ways, allowing all the functions of life to slowly emerge, such as primitive metabolic pathways
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for energy production, which can in turn fuel other processes like replication. Replication is done in autocatalytic fashion, where RNA molecules become capable of self-replication, or even sets of RNA molecules that form autocatalytic sets. Once this behavior arises, evolutionary principles truly take hold, as the systems of molecules that self-replicate the most rapidly and efficiently will proliferate in a statistically significant way and come to dominate
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the landscape. This is almost indistinguishable from the Darwinian concept of natural selection, as sporadic errors in replication result in novel sequences which can be either harmful or beneficial, and the best sequences are selected, just as can be said about living organisms. It should be stressed that this concept is not strictly hypothetical. These principles have been demonstrsted in the laboratory, with various ribozymes competing for a common pool of
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substrates in Darwinian fashion, compounds which are needed for amplification of the RNA sequences, and the ones which did this the most efficiently dominated the reaction mixture. It is true that complete protocells have not been produced in this manner, and sustained replication remains a challenge. But efforts in this direction are encouraging. This is an incredibly complex field which we won’t describe in further detail, but I will link to several reviews of the field in the
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description for those who wish to read further. With all of this in mind, creationists have a lot of objections, some of which are no more than voicing current limitations of the field that researchers are perfectly aware of, while others are simply demonstrations of ignorance. First, there is skepticism about the probability of these functional sequences of RNA forming by chance, the ones that are capable of catalysis, specifically autocatalysis. It’s a perfectly fine issue to
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raise, as we should want to know what proportion of potential RNA sequences possess such function, and the same goes for polypeptides. As it turns out, studies have been done to answer precisely this question, and the answer is around 1 in 100 billion. This may sound rare, and it is, but in the molecular world it’s not as rare as one might think. Molecules are staggeringly numerous. A glass of water contains around a trillion trillion water molecules. That’s 10 to the
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24th power. Compare that to 100 billion, or 10 to the 11th power, and the difference in magnitude is stark. Biopolymers are not water molecules of course, but it remains the case that in a microenvironment where it is mechanistically feasible for these molecules to be constantly forming, the number of sequences that will form is absolutely astronomical. And when you have an astronomical number of opportunities for something to occur, even infinitesimal probabilities become
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a near certainty. Whether a functionally relevant sequence comes about once per minute or once per day or once per year, nature had a long time to stumble upon these sequences, and once efficient self-replication is occurring, that information could be locked into existence if it can survive long enough to exert that function. This concept will return in part four when we discuss molecular
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biology, because similar arguments are put forward regarding DNA, proteins, and every other aspect of much more familiar biological systems, so we will continue this discussion of probability later. The next topic that creationists beat to death which pertains to the emergence of life is the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. Entropy, roughly speaking, is a measure of the dispersal of
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matter and energy in a system. So if molecules are highly concentrated and organized it would be a low entropy system, and if molecules are very spread out and disorganized it is a high entropy system. Regarding the second law of thermodynamics, some creationists claim that this law forbids order from forming spontaneously, which it doesn’t, and they regurgitate this falsehood at every opportunity. Obviously ordered structures form spontaneously all the time. Water
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molecules freeze to form beautifully patterned ice crystals. Highly ordered minerals form. Soap molecules spontaneously aggregate to form micelles, a process that also explains the formation of the first vesicle membranes from analogous molecules like simple fatty acids. Localized ordered structures are not just possible but specifically promoted by thermodynamics. What this law actually says is that the entropy of the universe must increase for any spontaneous
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process. Spontaneity is determined by the change in a parameter called Gibbs free energy, represented by delta G. This in turn is determined by the change in enthalpy, delta H, which essentially can be thought of as heat exchange when at constant pressure, as well as change in entropy, delta S, and also temperature, T, according to the following equation. The first problem lies in pretending that this law pertains to systems like a living organism or even
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the Earth itself. These are both nonequilibrium open systems, constantly in motion and exchanging both energy and matter with their surroundings. When localized ordered structures arise, like water molecules forming ice, the new interactions between the water molecules, called hydrogen bonds, cause the system of molecules to release energy. So the system of molecules goes to a lower energy, and this energy is released to the surroundings. This amounts to
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a dispersal of energy and therefore an increase in entropy for the universe. Zooming in, entropy has decreased locally, as the water molecules become more ordered, so delta S is negative, but they have released energy, so delta H is negative, and this will yield a negative value for delta G, making the process spontaneous with respect to the system of molecules. Zooming back out, once again, the release of energy means an increase in entropy for the system plus the surroundings,
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also known as the universe. The local decrease in entropy is irrelevant, it is the increase in entropy for the universe that is ordained by the second law of thermodynamics. This applies to the polymerization and aggregation of molecules as well, they are perfectly spontaneous processes. So creationists who say that thermodynamics does not permit the self-organization of ordered systems have absolutely no clue what they are talking about, or they are lying, or both.
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To go even further, plenty of studies have been done for decades regarding the manner in which systems which are receiving a constant efflux of energy, like the Earth receiving constant sunlight, will inevitably produce ordered structures so as to dissipate these external gradients of free energy, so as to move away from a position of equilibrium and release energy, thereby producing an increase in entropy for the universe. It is entirely accurate to say that for
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such nonequilibrium systems, in precise opposition of creationist claims, entropy is the thing that specifically drives the formation of locally ordered structures, from hurricanes to galaxies to living organisms. It can’t be made more clear than this. It is specifically the second law of thermodynamics which leads to an increase in order and ultimately makes life inevitable if enough time and resources are available. Another erroneous point that creationists
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make has to do with the concept of information. It is accurate to say that an RNA strand which is self-replicating contains and transmits information. Actually, any RNA strand contains information, whether it is functional or not. The information is the sequence of nucleotides in the strand, which will be some combination of A, U, G, and C. Just like how words contain information by virtue of their letters, the same can be said for these biopolymers with varying subunits. What
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matters most is functional information, which represents the probability of a configuration achieving a particular function. Creationists will therefore relentlessly ask: Where did the information come from? Some will even refer to it as “specified information”, implying that it had to be specified by a creator, since it yields such precise functionality. Other creationists pretend that information is some kind of essence or material substance that the molecule possesses,
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other than the sequence itself, and which must have its origin explained. When ribonucleotides polymerize, some sequence will result. That’s the information. Any sequence of nucleotides possesses information, so the process of nucleotide polymerization necessarily produces information. It is the process of selection, based on replication rate and fidelity, which makes this information meaningful. So anyone who asks “where did the information
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comes from” does not understand what information is nor what biopolymers are. Lastly, a newer trend is for creationists to fixate on the concept of chirality as it pertains to biomolecules. Carbon-based molecules of a certain size often exhibit chirality, or handedness, in that they have mirror images that are different from themselves, because of the way carbon can make four bonds with a three-dimensional tetrahedral geometry. Here is
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a simple molecule and its mirror image, which we would call its enantiomer. They are structurally identical, but the atoms are distributed differently in three-dimensional space. The issue for biology is that molecules exhibit bioactivity on the basis of their shape, and it is the case that both amino acids and ribonucleotides that are found in life exhibit a particular chirality out of two possibilities. That is to say, biological polypeptides and nucleic acids are homochiral. An
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important question becomes: How did this chirality arise and become implemented in biological systems? The creationist approach is to simply proclaim design, but in reality there are myriad explanations for how this occurred. When small monomers form, they can crystallize as mixtures of both forms, and then these crystals can sublime, which means going from the solid phase to the gas phase. The rates of sublimation can differ according to the composition of the crystal,
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with a specific enantiomer collecting somewhere else in greater concentration, and this is one manner in which enantioenrichment can occur. Additionally, amino acid crystallization can induce the preferential cocrystallization of a specific enantiomer of other amino acids. Looking instead at the polymerization phase, if reactions are occuring on chiral mineral surfaces, the rate of reaction for one enantiomer might be faster than the other, introducing a kinetic bias
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and thus enantioenriched polymers. This can happen with wet-dry cycling as well, if the rates of polymerization differ according to which enantiomer is reacting. We can even look to a later phase with replication, where rates can be unequal and introduce a bias yet again. This has been verified experimentally. Homochiral peptides and RNA replicate faster than heterochiral systems. A similar objection is made about oligonucleotides linking at carbon two
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on the sugar moiety as well as carbon three. Studies have shown that C3 prime linked RNA is a much better replicator than C2 prime. Additionally, other studies show that some C2 prime linkage can be present in a ribozyme and its function will be retained. With all of these objections, the key concept that creationists are missing is selection. In summary, creationists offer the poorest takes on the topic of abiogenesis out of virtually
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everything they attempt to discuss, simply because it’s the most conceptually dense and esoteric aspect of the science that offends them. The level of distortion that occurs in equating the complexity of extant life with what must have been the first protocell, or the mechanisms by which its constituent parts can have formed, is unrivaled by even the most unhinged assessments of evolution, because of how complicated these concepts are. While that was certainly a heavily
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abbreviated version of what we know regarding the origin of life, it hopefully serves to clarify the profound short-sightedness with which creationists approach this complicated subject, and there are numerous resources in the description if you wish to investigate some more. In the future I hope to create an extended series about this research, the history of the field, and much more detailed
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explanations regarding all of the facets we have discussed here, directly examining the primary literature produced by thousands of researchers, so be on the lookout for that. For now, let’s move forward to part three, where we will discuss the meatiest entry, evolutionary biology.
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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 at
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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
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same 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
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that 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,
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but there are certain 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 the currently living members of a group plus all its descendants. A
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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 goal of evolution, and inferior species that have to be traversed to get
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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 that the closest living relatives of whales are hippos. This does not mean hippos are ancestors
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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 over tens of millions of years. This is one of the main concepts that creationists do not understand,
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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 not see sufficient transitional species. And this is true of the 1860s. It is no longer true today,
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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 land mammals and whales, no matter how ignorant this proclamation is regarding the anatomy of
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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 doesn’t matter that every single biological anthropologist in the world would attest to
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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% complete, and allowed us to prove that these apes were bipedal, due to some very clear anatomical
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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 baboon bone found in the specimen, so it’s just a baboon. It’s actually true, decades later it
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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. By 1922 it was realized by the scientific community that it actually belonged to an
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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. They will also bring up the Piltdown man. This was a paleoanthropological fraud where bone fragments
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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 exposed by the scientific community itself. In the end, this is all creationists can do,
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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 just chimps or people, due to the undeniable intermediary characteristics they possess.
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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 prevent us from filling in the fossil record thoroughly enough to make evolution and common
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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 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
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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 becomes more and more unreasonable. But creationists are not reasonable, so this is
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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 attempts
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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 nonetheless.
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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 more like 30-40
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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 the idea
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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
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men 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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So far in this series we have gone through the most common creationist talking points pertaining to cosmology, planetary science, abiogenesis, evolutionary biology, and paleontology. Let’s continue by zooming in to the molecular level, so that we can discuss evolution from the standpoint of genetics and molecular biology. Most creationists do not comprehend genetics on even a high school level. For this reason, it is very easy to run circles around less educated
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creationists within this unintuitive sphere. If they don’t understand what DNA is or what it does, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. More sophisticated intelligent design proponents focus most of their propaganda on this area as well, because it is so much more esoteric, and lying with confidence about things that their targets don’t understand gives them a high probability of success. There’s lots to discuss here, so let’s get started.
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First we need to go over some background information. Creationists don’t understand genetics, but you should, so let’s hit the basics in ultra-abbreviated fashion. As always, I have tutorials on biochemistry and biology that explain everything we will discuss in greater detail, so head there after this series if you want to take the next step. For our purposes, let’s make sure we know what DNA is. DNA is a nucleic acid, which means it is a polymer of nucleotides. There
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are four different nucleotides in DNA, each made of a sugar, a phosphate, and a nitrogenous base. These bases are abbreviated as A, T, C, and G. Nucleotides come together in different combinations to make DNA, which is made of two strands that coil together in a double helix, with the bases pointing towards each other in the interior. The way the two strands anneal is according to base pairing. A pairs with T and C with G. Every organism has a genome which is made
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of some number of chromosomes, which are very long DNA molecules with billions of base pairs, wrapped around proteins called histones. These chromosomes are the genetic code, which contains instructions for the assembly of the organism during embryonic development and its maintenance throughout its life. This occurs through transcription and translation. In transcription, small portions of the chromosome called genes are opened up by enzymes in order to
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generate an mRNA transcript. This occurs by the same rules of base pairing as for DNA, but mRNA is a little different. Then the mRNA is translated by a ribosome, again through simple base pairing, in order to generate a protein. This happens because the tRNA molecules that match up with the mRNA transcript, three bases at a time, are attached to specific amino acids, and the amino acids join together to form a polypeptide, which folds into a protein.
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Proteins do almost everything in your body. There are structural proteins, there are enzymes that do chemistry, there are receptor proteins that receive messages and trigger physiological functions, and so forth. One of the most important aspects of genetics for our purposes here is the way that the genome guides embryonic development to yield a particular type of animal. Unfortunately this is exceedingly complex, but we can at least describe Hox genes,
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which are a group of related genes that specify regions of the body plan along the head-tail axis of an animal. Encoded in these genes is the number and positions of limbs and other structures that will develop along the body. This is because the genes code for transcription factors, which are proteins that help turn other genes on and off by selectively binding to them, thus either promoting or inhibiting gene expression at hundreds of other sites on the genome. Because Hox
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genes have products that regulate so many other genes, changes to these genes can have dramatic effects on the developing organism’s body plan. With that covered, we now have to discuss mutations. Mutations describe changes to the genome. There are many different kinds of mutations and they can occur for many different reasons. The most simple mutations are point mutations. That is a change in just one base pair, from whichever base it was supposed to
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be to some other base. This can occur due to endogenous or exogenous mutagens. Carcinogens, UV light, or totally natural decay processes where radioactive nuclides within the body decay and produce a high energy particle that strikes a base in the genome of a particular cell. Errors can also occur during replication, where the enzyme creating the new strand makes a mistake. Repair enzymes exist to fix these errors, as well as the other mutations we described, but they don’t catch
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them all, so point mutations happen in every organism all the time. Most are neutral, many of the rest are harmful, and some are beneficial. It depends on whether any of the amino acids in the resulting protein change, and how that affects the function of that protein. If it’s an enzyme, it could function more efficiently. Or less. Or it could lose function. Or even change functions if several mutations accumulate. We have to understand some other types of
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mutations that can occur. There are mutations like insertions and deletions that change the reading frame of the gene, which usually result in a non-functional protein. But there are also macromutations. Very significant changes to the genome can sometimes occur. For example, gene duplication. During replication, the enzyme can copy a section of DNA more than once. Additionally, during crossing over between homologous chromosomes in meiosis,
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a type of cell division, misalignment can result in two copies of the same gene getting into one chromosome. With two copies of the same gene, neofunctionalization is now possible. One copy of the gene can be retained, while the other gene can slowly accumulate mutations and therefore yield a totally different protein product. No function is lost, while a new one can be gained, and studies show that around 50% of gene duplications lead to functional divergence.
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A similar situation occurs with orphan genes, or de novo genes. There are sections of DNA called promoters which sit next to the coding region of a gene that an enzyme will interact with, resulting in transcription of the gene. A mutation event can sometimes rearrange sections of the chromosome which result in a promoter being placed next to a previously non-coding section of DNA. This results in a brand new gene instantly, with a totally random sequence and therefore a totally
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random protein product. This protein might be useless, but it might not, and any modest functionality can be subsequently molded through natural selection. The potentiality of a process like gene duplication is magnified tremendously when entire chromosomes duplicate. This is again typically due to errors during cell division, where homologous chromosomes or sister chromatids don’t separate during meiosis so one cell ends up with multiple copies of the same chromosome. This
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leads to the possibility of many different genes going through neofunctionalization, which can have dramatic effects for an organism. Now if any of these mutations occur in the somatic cells of an organism, the effect is usually minor. But if they occur in the germline cells of the organism, or the cells that produce gametes, meaning sperm and eggs, then we are looking at the offspring having a significantly different genotype than the parents, and thus potentially
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a different phenotype, which refers to actual morphological differences. These are typically very tiny, but sometimes not so tiny. It simply depends on how those proteins influence embryonic development and the determination of the body plan. We have physically observed instances where even single point mutations can have drastic effects on an animal’s morphology, like legs growing from a fly’s head instead of antennae, extra pairs of wings, and other major changes.
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The implications for evolution are obvious. With this understood we can now begin to outline the various mechanisms by which evolution operates. Whereas Darwin envisioned only natural selection, over the 150 years since, we now know that there are many other mechanisms also at play.
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Apart from mutation, which produces genetic variety, and natural selection, where organisms better suited for survival and reproduction have their genes more likely to proliferate, there are a few other important ones. Genetic drift describes a change in the relative frequency of an allele in a population due to chance and random sampling. An allele is a copy of a gene. Most animals have two copies of every gene, one from each parent, and each copy is called an allele.
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Alleles can be dominant or recessive, and this genotype can dictate the phenotype, or the version of a particular trait that is expressed on the organism. There is also gene flow, which describes the movement of genes from one population to another, often due to migration, which can increase genetic diversity. Then there is sexual selection, or non-random mating based on perceived evolutionary fitness. This operates by criteria that are quite different from survivability, and
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can produce interesting morphological features. Horizontal gene transfer, niche construction, epigenetics, the list is long and we need not dwell on every detail for our purposes. As we can see, evolution relies largely on population dynamics, and changes that occur on the genetic level which Darwin could never have understood in his time, before we even knew that DNA existed. Creationists relentlessly talk about Darwinism and Darwinian evolution and
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in general never shut up about Darwin for this specific reason. He lived a long time ago before we actually understood evolution, so they will try to present evolution in this primitive lens. Young Earth creationists and intelligent design advocates alike will always return to the same mantra, random mutation and natural selection are insufficient in producing the variety of life. They will all say this every chance they get. And yet, even with the couple of minutes of
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background information we just went over, we can immediately see how dishonest this is. When they say random mutation, they mean point mutations. These are more limited in scope. They are ignoring macromutations like gene duplication, de novo genes, or chromosome duplication, which produce significant discrepancies in the genome in a single generation. And when they say natural selection, they are limiting evolution to a singular mechanism,
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ignoring the others we described. This is a deliberate misrepresentation of the scope and potentiality of evolutionary processes. More detailed attempts to misrepresent genetics will take advantage of the negative connotation of the word “mutation” to pretend that all mutations are harmful. They will say things like “mutations degrade genetic information”, as though a bucket of toxic green goo has fallen on the DNA and is giving it chemical burns. In reality mutations
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are simply changes to the genetic code. As we said, with point mutations, the vast majority are neutral. The mutation does not result in any change whatsoever to the protein product. Of the remaining possibilities, some are harmful and some are beneficial, we have to look at the change made to the protein. Is the amino acid that changed in the active site of an enzyme? Does this cause it
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to bind to its substrate more tightly? Or not at all? Any of these possibilities could be bad or good, depending on the situation. Significantly harmful mutations are not often observed because those organisms tend to die quickly without reproducing, so we disproportionately observe beneficial mutations and improved function, which can appear like design to the unprepared mind. Another creationist fixation has to do with probability. They will take any enzyme, like say
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DNA polymerase, and remark how unlikely it is for that to have arisen by chance. In order to make it seem impossible, they will play a devious numbers game. They’ll say: Here’s an enzyme with 300 amino acid residues, there are 20 amino acids, so the probability of this precise sequence evolving by chance is one in 20 to the 300th power. Their targets will gasp at the infinitesimal odds, and conclude that it can only exist because god willed it so. This is ridiculous. That precise
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sequence is far from the only sequence that will perform that function. Many of the amino acids in the active site of an enzyme have limited variability, although even those have some, but the rest of the amino acids contribute only to the overall shape of the enzyme, and thus have tremendous variability. There are sets of amino acids that are extremely similar. Amino acids have the same general structure plus a variable side chain. Here are a few that have an alkyl
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side chain, meaning they consist of only carbon and hydrogen. Anywhere we find one of these, we could easily swap to another similar one and the effect on the enzyme would be practically non-existent. Only if we switched from something like a hydrophobic to a hydrophilic side chain, like alkyl to one containing a hydroxyl group, could that potentially have an impact on the folding pattern, and even then it is unlikely to be significant. So we are saying that the majority
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of the amino acid residues could be completely different, and the function would be identical or similar. Furthermore, new enzymes don’t have to function optimally. They can perform a function with moderate efficiency and then get refined by natural selection over time. And finally, we know for a fact that many different sequences can perform the same function, because different organisms have different versions of the same enzymes. Looking again at
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DNA polymerase, different organisms have different polymerase enzymes. They have different sequences, and we give them different names, yet they all copy DNA. With genetic engineering we manipulate the amino acid sequence of enzymes to make them perform more efficiently than the natural counterpart. There is tremendous variability and nothing is perfect in the first place. So this is lazy propaganda on the part of creationists. Nature creates many sequences,
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stumbles upon functional sequences by chance, and those are optimized and amplified by natural selection. Plenty of research has been done which corroborates the fact that totally random sequences are an abundant source of bioactive RNA and peptides. This is not controversial. Recalling the creationist claim that microevolution is possible but not macroevolution, this seems even more ridiculous in the light of molecular biology. There is no mechanistic
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distinction between the two, it’s all based on mutations. We already explained how certain point mutations and especially macromutations can produce significant morphological change even in a single generation. Changes to HOX and TALE genes can dramatically revise the body plan. Differential gene activation can affect cell differentiation, thus allowing cells in different regions of the body to do different things. And in general, all of this hinges on creationist
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incredulity regarding embryonic development. Creationists have no idea how this process works. If a creationist tells you that evolution can’t produce large scale changes to a body plan, ask them how a body plan is implemented during embryonic development in the first place. Just ask them point blank. All animals begin as one cell, right? So how does that become a specific animal with a specific body plan? Just sit and wait for an answer. If they offer anything at all,
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it will be vague, like: “The DNA has the instructions and that’s how you get the body plan.” But how? Ask specifically and repeatedly. How, mechanistically, on the molecular level, does the body plan develop? I bet you a million dollars that not a single creationist will give you a detailed answer. The reaction to this is therefore: You have no idea how the body plan arises. You have no idea what happens on the cellular or molecular level as a single cell
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becomes a complete organism. Yet you are somehow an expert on what this process can and can’t produce? Hopefully this will embarrass them enough to do some learning, or at least question their beliefs. If they are quiet enough to receive more information, you can then tell them about how body plans arise from the time-regulated expression of specific genes, so mutations in those genes
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can change the body plan. Tell them about all the kinds of macromutations they definitely have never heard of. Tell them about examples of visible change that result from even point mutations, like flies growing legs instead of antennae. Creationists do not know these things. There is no barrier preventing new species from emerging. Mutations accumulate and the organisms change accordingly, so there is no meaningful distinction between micro and macroevolution.
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Getting more specific on the anatomical level, looking at certain transitions, like from sea to land or from land to sea, is it really that shocking to go from hands and feet, to webbed hands and feet, to fins? Is it really that hard to wrap one’s head around how that might occur? What are the necessary changes to the genome that can push animal morphology in that direction? Even with humans, early in embryonic development, hands and feet form in flipper-like
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paddle shapes. Fingers and toes subsequently separate, elongate, and then lose webbing that is between them. This loss of webbing is due to interdigital necrosis, a type of cell death, so genes are selectively expressed in those cells that result in those cells dying such that the fingers can separate. If those genes are not expressed, the webbing can remain, and there are disorders in humans where precisely this happens. If this occurred with animals in aquatic habitats,
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it would be an enormous fitness benefit. It’s a heritable trait, so all of a sudden many organisms within a population can have webbed extremities. Further modification to the genome can affect embryonic limb development such that a more fin-like structure is retained, and then you have fins. All of this is determined during embryonic development, where the limbs are going through different stages anyway. Large scale morphological change can occur simply by silencing
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a certain aspect of embryonic development in a particular part of the body. It’s as simple as blocking a single gene from being expressed. And by looking at this example of webbed extremities, we are even identifying intermediary structures. Life wouldn’t have to go straight to fins. There can be many gradations in between, such as hybrid structures that are not optimized for either walking or swimming. Even this kind of anatomy can be considered useful,
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because such an organism can suddenly evade predators in either habitat, land or sea. Continuing with embryonic development, a favorite creationist talking point is to reference the early history of embryology. In the 19th century, Ernst Haeckel pioneered this field by observing the embryos of many different species and hand-drawing their development at various stages. Comparing these developmental pathways offers many clues regarding evolutionary relationships,
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since many aspects of development are shared between distantly related animals. For example, all chordates, including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, tunicates, and lancelets, have a notochord, dorsal hollow nerve cord, pharyngeal arches, a post-anal tail, and an endostyle or thyroid gland at some point in their development. Some chordates have all of these characteristics as adults, like lancelets, but others lose at least some of them later on. For example, humans
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lack an intact notochord, pharyngeal arches, and post-anal tail. Our notochord gets broken up to become the intervertebral discs, the pharyngeal arches become parts of our face and neck, and the post-anal tail shrinks away to a tiny vestige of its former self. But these structures still do form during embryonic development. We have 10-12 tail vertebrae before they retract into the soft tissue. It would seem odd from the perspective of design that embryos would
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go through stages where structures grow that will not be present on the mature organism. But it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution, where development begins a certain way, and then mutations cause gene expression to change at a particular stage, where existing structures then become reduced or modified. What Haeckel correctly showed was that all chordates go through a phylotypic or pharyngula stage, where the embryos of animals as diverse
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as elephants and sharks look extremely similar. What he got wrong was an idea he referred to as “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, or the idea that organisms recapitulate their evolutionary ancestry during development. There is some truth to this notion, like the way that mammalian earbones detach from the jaw during development, but broadly speaking the idea is not accurate. By this we mean that a mammal doesn’t go through a specific fish stage,
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followed by an amphibian stage, and then a reptile stage, and so forth. Later embryologists recognized the extreme similarity early on but that embryos then diverge radically in morphology. The drama enters when people accuse Haeckel of fraudulence. While this is primarily creationists, it also included a few biologists. They will say that he fudged the scale or exaggerated characteristics, since they were hand drawings. In reality he made them the same size for ease
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of comparison. Additionally he accidentally used the same drawing for three embryos in his first edition, but this was pointed out to him and he fixed the images for later editions. Creationists essentially make a lot of fuss out of nothing, and when they bring this up you can ask them to clarify what they mean and where they got their information. They will have no response. Even more important, however, is the fact that Haeckel was undeniably correct. Embryos do go
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through these stages, and various mammalian embryos are virtually indistinguishable for a significant portion of development, something that is easily confirmed in the modern era where we no longer have to draw embryos, we can easily get real-time images of them. They look more or less just like Haeckel’s drawings. Moving on, there are some classic arguments from intelligent design proponents that must be neutralized. The first is the so-called waiting
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time problem. This one says that adaptations which require multiple mutations are impossible because of the improbability of those specific mutations occurring in a reasonable time span. There are a lot of issues here. First, nature is never going for a specific set of mutations. Mutations occur and they are either selected for or they aren’t. And these mutations do not have to occur in a specific sequence, they could occur in any sequence across an entire population and then come
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together during the recombination phase of sexual reproduction, such that each parent can have one mutation and the offspring has both. Furthermore, the idea that each individual mutation can’t be selected for because only the entire set confers the beneficial adaptation is incorrect. Individual mutations could still confer a slight survival advantage and therefore proliferate statistically.
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A similar argument from ID proponents is that of irreducible complexity. This states that some biological structures are so complex, with so many interconnected parts, that it can’t possibly have evolved, because removing just one component renders the structure unusable, and therefore none of the individual components can have been selected for, such that it could have arisen piecemeal. It’s all or nothing. Their favorite example of such a structure is the bacterial
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flagellum. They will describe this structure using as much mechanical language as possible, drawing parallels to actual human machinery. This is part of the deception. Humans built these things, so god must have built this thing. In actuality, this is a façade. First of all, when describing something like the bacterial flagellum, they are never honest about how many different types of bacterial flagella there are, and the wide range of complexity they display,
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which demonstrate the range of solutions nature can invent to solve the same problem. Just because a flagellum is highly complex now, it doesn’t mean it was always that way. Individual components can have complexified after the general function was reached, and there are extant flagella which lack components that others possess, yet they still function. Second, they always ignore the concept
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of exaptation. Instead of waiting for entirely new proteins to arise, like those that become the components of a bacterial flagellum, existing proteins can be slightly modified to develop entirely new functions. Sometimes a very small number of mutations is enough to achieve this, and a new protein suddenly exists for inclusion in some apparatus. Third, any such irreducible structures are never actually irreducible, and often times reduced structures specifically
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do exist. For the bacterial flagellum, a corresponding reduced structure is called the injectisome. This is a needle-like protein complex that uses components of the flagellar apparatus, but instead of generating motion it secretes effector proteins. It doesn’t matter whether the flagellum evolved from the injectisome or vice versa, the claim that ID proponents make is that with any irreducibly complex apparatus, there is no possibility of any reduced structure. Yet here
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we see one. It uses only some of the components of the flagellum and serves a totally different function. We can say the same thing about absolutely any molecular or anatomical feature that they claim is irreducibly complex. When they bring up eyesight, they ignore everything we know about the evolution of eyes, and the many types of eyes in the animal kingdom, ranging from a tiny bundle of photoreceptors to complex eyeballs like those in humans or squids, and everything
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in between. In fact it is known that eyes have evolved independently dozens of times in different species, as an example of convergent evolution. Vision is a highly valuable trait, so any features that bestow this function will be heavily selected for, which is why it happened so many times, resulting in many different types of eyes. It’s not necessary for entire eyes to suddenly exist, smaller structures are still useful and can be selected for. Even a naked bundle
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of photoreceptors can indicate to an organism which direction light is coming from. That’s enough for it to move towards a region where it can do photosynthesis, or feed on photosynthetic microorganisms. The same can be said for metabolic pathways. They will claim that the Krebs cycle is irreducibly complex, but the evolution of this cycle is well-understood, utilizing these same concepts of sequential changes and exaptation of existing proteins. They simply ignore the
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mountains of primary literature on these topics, knowing their targets will never read it either. A good analogy for irreducible complexity is complex ecosystems. These are comprised of many different species of animals, plants, fungi, and microorganisms. There is a delicate balance, such that the removal of one species could cause the whole thing to collapse, just like one protein from the flagellum. But this doesn’t mean it was poofed into existence
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precisely as it is today. Ecosystems respond to the stimuli that are present, minor perturbations, slowly shifting inputs, and interdependence can emerge gradually. Tiny changes over long periods of time allow for a gradual response that produces a more robust system. A sudden dramatic change, like deleting an entire population of organisms, has a much bigger impact. That we can’t start
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stripping away components of the ecosystem doesn’t mean that simpler ecosystems can’t exist, or that this specific ecosystem wasn’t at one point much simpler. The same goes for any cellular component. In general, the pseudoscientific nature of intelligent design can be exposed simply by asking its proponents to put forward a rigorous model. Which biological structures are designed? Which
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are not? Is there an empirical way to test whether something is designed? Can they make predictions of any kind regarding biological systems? When asked, intelligent design proponents flat out admit that they can’t answer these questions, they simply know design when they see it, which is a total copout. And also, they clearly don’t, as we already showed with their most favorite example of the bacterial flagellum. Intelligent design is just a god of
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the gaps argument in a tuxedo, nothing more. Another aspect of genetics that creationists lie about is the proportion of the genome that is functional. Genes themselves make up around 1-2% of the genome, that is the percentage of actual coding DNA, whether protein-coding, or genes for ribosomes, transfer RNA, and so forth. Some time ago it was thought that the rest served little to no function, and was therefore referred to as junk DNA. Over the decades we have come to understand
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that there are sections that serve some role in influencing gene expression. There are promoters, enhancers, and other elements that have important functions. But this still puts the cap at around 10% in terms of the proportion of the genome that is functional. The rest remains junk DNA. This of course makes perfect sense in the context of evolution, as nature uses a large genetic canvas,
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and only certain portions of the genome evolve functionality by chance, while the rest must still be replicated and maintained at great energetic cost. Nature is not so efficient that it could have evolved genomes that are entirely functional, and the percentage of DNA that is functional decreases along with decreasing population sizes, since the greater the population, the greater the strength of natural selection on mutations. So many eukaryotes are able to accrue lots of
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junk DNA, as opposed to some bacterial species that comparatively have a larger proportion of functional DNA in their genomes. In the context of design this does not make any sense. Why couldn’t a designer simply design a genome without wasting so much space? Why include the 90% that doesn’t do anything? Creationists will cite the earlier view that only genes were functional, vaguely reference more modern knowledge regarding sections with other functions,
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and say: “See! There is no junk DNA! All of it has some purpose, just like the creator intended!” But this is a fabrication. Most of the genome is indeed functionless. It is simply that a small fraction turned out to have functions that are now well-understood by molecular biologists. Speaking of promoters and other genomic elements, plenty of research has been done surrounding these structures that specifically demonstrates how resourceful nature can be. Scientists have taken
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a wild-type strain of E. coli and stripped away the native promoter region of the lac operon, the gene necessary for metabolizing lactose. This is a segment of about 100 base pairs, which was replaced with totally random sequences, such that the gene will not be transcribed and the resulting lactose-metabolizing enzyme cannot form. As a control, in one case, the promoter region was simply deleted and not replaced with anything. Needless to say,
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these bacteria could not survive on lactose alone because they could not metabolize it. Different clones with different random sequences were grown on a medium consisting of some glycerol, which they could metabolize, and increasing levels of lactose. After a few rounds of mutation and selection, clones arose which metabolized lactose. After about 100 rounds, these new E. coli clones thrived on lactose alone and the newly evolved promoters functioned as well as the wild type,
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some of which were also paired with mutations in the gene itself and thus different proteins. The only one that could never evolve was the one where the promoter region had simply been stripped away. This illustrates again the power of selection in vivo, showing how random sequences can acquire function in the presence of a selection mechanism, something creationists will forever deny even when
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it is demonstrated for them clear as day. It also demonstrates another fact creationists always forget to mention, that there are many solutions to a problem, which means completely distinct proteins can perform the same function to a satisfactory extent, something which makes their big number games even more meaningless. Another creationist claim in the area of molecular biology pertains to soft tissue found in dinosaur bones. A T.
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rex femur was found with the modified remains of flexible connective protein like collagen, fragmented blood vessels, and the remains of blood cells. This find was seemingly anomalous, as biological material was thought to not be able to survive for millions of years. Predictably, Young Earth creationists claimed it was proof that this and every other dinosaur in history were not ancient but recent, and walked the Earth alongside humans. But this interpretation ignores
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key facts and very obvious explanations. In reality, it is possible for soft tissue to be preserved under the right conditions. The process by which soft tissue decays depends on contact with air and water. But this soft tissue was in the dry interior of the specimen, stabilized by contact with hemoglobin and the mineral walls of the surrounding pores. Though fascinating, it does not change the dating of the specimen. In general, out of everything we could summarize
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regarding genetics and molecular biology, and how these fields corroborate evolutionary principles far beyond reasonable doubt, we certainly can focus on mutations, embryonic development, and other such complex topics. But we also can simply point to heredity. This is something most people can wrap their heads around. Your genome is very similar to those of your parents, because it is a combination of the genomes of your parents. That’s how paternity tests work,
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on the basis of genetic similarity. Using the principle of genetic similarity, we can tell who your father is, and your father’s father, and his father before him, and so forth. So why would anyone presume that this concept doesn’t work more broadly for genetic similarity between species? Humans and chimpanzees share 98.8% of their genome. This indicates very recent common ancestry. Other primates are slightly more dissimilar so the divergence was slightly more
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distant. And we can do this type of analysis for any two species on the planet. There are so many other indicators that align with this principle. We already discussed orphan genes, or de novo genes. When an organism develops an entirely new gene, that gene will continue to show up in its entire pool of descendants if the organism is reproductively successful. This is another marker of common descent. We can say the same thing for endogenous retroviruses,
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or ERVs. This is when a retrovirus, a special kind of virus that is capable of inserting its own genetic code into the genome of a host cell, does precisely this in a germline cell of an animal. Its offspring will then have that unique section of what was the viral genome, and this will be another marker we can use to identify common ancestry. There are countless ways to confirm evolutionary lineages that make no sense whatsoever in the context of design.
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We can expand this way of thinking to any genome as a whole. In order to discredit evolutionary theory, one would simply need to find two species that were anatomically so similar that they would have to be closely related under an evolutionary paradigm, but then discover that their genomes are such that they have a completely different suite of enzymes. This would be perfectly feasible if design were the case. Why wouldn’t the designer experiment with different enzymes in similar
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forms? And it would be nearly inexplicable in an evolutionary paradigm, because how could so many enzymes become totally different in what would have to be relatively few generations? Of course we never see this. The more related two species are on the tree of life, the greater the genetic similarity and the more enzymes they have in common. These are facts that do not “disprove” design, but when absolutely every aspect of biology conforms flawlessly to evolutionary
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principles, what room is left then, for this god of the gaps that creationists would have you believe in? Not much room at all, in fact. And with that we conclude the rigorously scientific portion of this series. Let’s move forward and wrap things up with some miscellaneous arguments that creationists make that are somewhat more in the vein of philosophy or theology. At this point in the series, we’ve covered an enormous range of fallacious talking points that
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creationists employ, from cosmology all the way to molecular biology. Let’s finish things up by reviewing arguments that creationists put forward which are not necessarily based in discrediting scientific data, but are rather more philosophical or theological in nature. It turns out that creationists are not just allergic to science, but also to basic logic, and this shines through in its purest form when the arguments are intended to be of a more basal nature than scientific
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inquiry. We can also take this opportunity to point out the most popular dishonest tactics that creationists use in discussion or debate, and then throw in any miscellaneous points that didn’t fit anywhere else in the series. Let’s start out with the existence of the universe, which we alluded to in part one but left for later. All creationists, top to bottom, insist that the existence of the universe is totally nonsensical without a deity
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to have created it. They are perplexed as to how something could exist without cause, yet they do not apply this logic to their deity, which also needs its existence explained, thus inevitably resulting in an infinite regression of deities. They are perplexed as to how a universe could exist without cause, so they invent an infinitely more complex deity that somehow exists without cause. If they are comfortable with their deity simply existing, why can’t the universe simply
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exist? There is no consistency to their logic. The more intellectual creationist will attempt to identify some logical loophole to justify this privileged status for their deity. The universe began to exist, so it needs a cause, but their deity did not begin to exist. He simply has always existed, or exists outside of time, so no cause is required. These justifications, existing infinitely into the past, or existence without time, are precisely as absurd as a
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universe existing without cause. There is no basis for presuming that such things are possible. And even if we were to entertain the notion of a deity existing, it would not be their specific deity, which can be disproved in countless other ways that go beyond the scope of this series. We can all admit that existence is a mystery. The idea of a universe simply existing is perplexing, and thinking about that idea is discomforting. Logical people experience precisely the same
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discomfort when imagining a deity existing without cause. There is no inherent difference. Creationists perceive a difference because they want their deity to exist for emotional reasons, either because they were told the deity exists since birth and changing their fundamental worldview would be devastating to their psyche, or because they are afraid to die, and they have convinced themselves that their deity will save them from their mortality. These are the two
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reasons people will insist that a deity must exist. For the rest of us, we certainly cannot disprove the existence of a deity. But the notion that a deity must exist, or that logic somehow points to the existence of a deity, is ridiculous. In the realm of pure philosophy, great thinkers like Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Hume, and Heidegger have pondered the problem of existence. It is puzzling that anything exists rather than nothing. Hume in particular argued that although our
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experience is dominated by causality, perhaps the formation of the universe is fundamentally outside of our experience and may be exempt from this guideline. Perhaps there is an uncaused cause. This could be a deity, or it could be the universe itself. There is no basis for determining such a thing. But if we are comparing the likelihood of a finite thing or an infinite thing existing
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without cause, the former seems more likely. Some attempts at justifying this notion will talk about nothingness as an unstable state, such that it is, in a way, impossible for nothing to exist. This is about as speculative as metaphysics can get, so this is not an attempt at disproving god, simply at pointing out that logic definitely does not specifically point to the existence of any god. Because science does not understand how the universe began, when creationists insist that
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it must have been god, this is called a god of the gaps argument. “I don’t know therefore god” is the essence of this argument. Creationists use this for many things without basis, since they pretend that there are not naturalistic explanations for the formation of the Earth as well as the origin and diversity of life. There are. Those are instances where they are shoving their god into a gap that does not exist. The origin of the universe is the only gap where a god still fits,
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which is why deistic evolution is not specifically unscientific. But in general, “I don’t know therefore god” is always the worst answer to any scientific question. Various gods have been kicked out of their respective gaps countless times in human history, as we began to learn how everything actually works, so one can simply extrapolate that trend. Furthermore, empiricism will always beat baseless guesses that make one feel special. It is a good idea for humanity to simply get
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comfortable with not knowing things. Pivoting to philosophy of science, or at least misuse of scientific terminology, many creationists will abuse the word “theory”. Preachers in particular will exclaim that evolution is a theory, not a law, or a fact. Therefore, it’s never been proven. This is preposterous. Gravity, for example, factually exists. It can be described by laws, such as Newton’s law of universal gravitation,
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or theories, such as Einstein’s general relativity. Gravity is a natural phenomenon, which factually exists, and can be described by laws or theories. Furthermore, theories are more powerful than laws. Newton’s equation is simply a summary of observations. It has predictive power, but no explanatory power. Relativity has both. It predicts everything Newton’s equation does and much more, but also explains what gravity is, the influence of the curvature of spacetime.
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In science, theories are better than laws. We can say the same about evolution. Evolution factually happens. We observe evolution every single day. We observe how genetic information changes over time, how the distribution of alleles changes over time, we observe speciation events. We observe evolution. Evolution happens. There is no arguing this. What creationists mean, of course, is that it isn’t proven that all life evolved from a common ancestor over several billion
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years. That’s where evolutionary theory comes in. Just as gravity is a natural phenomenon that can be described by a theory, evolution is also a natural phenomenon that can be described by a theory. Evolutionary theory explains how evolution occurs. It used to be limited to natural selection in Darwin’s time. This was broadened and labeled neo-Darwinism in the early 20th century, and by the end of the 20th century it came to be known as the modern synthesis. That is our current
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theory of evolution, one which is still growing today as new mechanisms are discovered. It is not a guess. Theories are not guesses or opinions. Theories are models that correlate large amounts of disparate data, elegantly explain all of this data at once, and make concrete, quantifiable, falsifiable predictions. That’s what our evolutionary model does. It takes the diversity of life, the fossil record, genetics, and so many other aspects of biology, and explains them with a
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single model. This model makes predictions, like the genetic similarity we should expect based on phylogenetic relatedness, or the locations of certain fossils based on biogeography, and so much more. Evolution as a theory, which explains the diversity of life, is consistent beyond reasonable doubt just like the theory of relativity. Creationism does not do any of this. Creationism is blind faith, coupled with a willful ignorance of scientific principles which contradict that
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blind faith. Creationists are constantly enacting defense mechanisms to deny this obvious fact. We can see these defense mechanisms in action with other terminology that they themselves have created. First, they will refer to anyone who accepts evolutionary biology as an “evolutionist”, which is not a real word. This is done to liken science to a belief system that people can subscribe to, just like a religion. Of course after everything we have discussed in this series,
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any rational person can see that empirical science is antithetical to faith. Faith is a suspension of reason in favor of emotion. Empiricism is a suspension of emotion in favor of reason. Only the evidence matters. They will do this with Darwin as well. As we mentioned before, they will complain about Darwinism, and Darwinists. This serves to denigrate Charles Darwin and paint him as not a scientist but a prophet. Again, this is because they are trying to level the playing
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field. Science is undeniably superior to religion in determining how the world works and what has physically happened in the past. So dragging an entire field of science down and likening it to the utterances of a single prophet makes it seem like nothing more than a competing set of doctrines that people can choose to have faith in or not. In reality, Darwin would be paralyzed with confusion by the modern biological sciences, having never even
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known that DNA exists or what molecules are in general. The amount of progress that has occurred since his time is barely conceivable. So to chop the head and limbs off of science, they pretend that nothing has happened in evolutionary biology since Origin of Species. In reality, pretending that modern evolutionary biology can be adequately described by Origin of Species is like pretending that quantum physics can be described by
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Newton’s Principia. It’s preposterous. Finally, they will often use the word “materialism” as a dirty word for describing the secularity of real science. Creationists believe in souls because they’re afraid to die. Science does not support the notion of souls because there is no evidence for them existing. This is one of the key incompatibilities that allow creationist propagandists to elicit an emotional response from their targets. It’s as if to say “Science says
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you die, while we say you live forever. Who are you going to choose?” It’s highly manipulative. This wordplay is used generally by all creationists, but let’s point out some of the trickery of intelligent design proponents in particular. First and foremost, they desperately seek to differentiate themselves from creationists, and Young Earth creationists in particular. Part of this is because they want to appear scholarly, so they promote a brand of
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creationism that accepts a greater proportion of the body of scientific knowledge. But the main reason is a political one. These groups are funded by wealthy fundamentalist Christian donors with the ultimate goal of pushing America, and perhaps other countries, towards a system of theocracy. An early step they’ve been pushing for decades is to get religion taught in public school science classes. This used to be called creation science. Don’t be fooled, it’s creationism, just with
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the word science in there. However, in 1987 the Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme Court decision ruled that “creation science” is a religious concept and therefore a violation of the Establishment Clause if taught in public school science classes. This ruling was a problem for them, as they had been pushing a particular propagandized textbook that had “creation science” all over it. With this term now a dead end, they needed a rebranding campaign. Hence, intelligent design.
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This would retain all of the lies and distortions of creation science, all the same talking points, everything would be the same word for word, except for two key adjustments. First, they would simply omit any specific mention of the Christian god, knowing that the credulous would fill in the blanks themselves. Here is how the original textbook defined creation science: “Creation means that the various forms of life began abruptly through the agency of an intelligent creator
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with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.” The new book contained the new term and this definition: “Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact – fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, and wings, etc.” Shockingly similar, don’t you think? But who could this intelligent agency
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be? I wonder. The second adjustment would be that they would replace every instance of “creation scientists” with “design proponents”. And by that I mean they literally used a text editing search and replace tool. We know for sure this is what they did because the first post-Edwards version contained in once place the telling typo “cdesign proponentsists”, where the word “creationists” was
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improperly replaced by “design proponents”. How much more transparent can it get that intelligent design is just creationism with a different name literally cut and pasted in its place? So when propaganda-peddling intelligent design proponents tell you that they aren’t creationists, tell them that you know, they are cdesign proponentsists. See how they react. Apart from this transparent treachery, there is so much dishonesty in the way
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these ideas are presented. Intelligent design desperately masquerades as science, by accepting geologic time and some degree of common descent, but it simply is not science. It’s just a glorified god of the gaps argument. That’s why it spends all of its time criticizing evolutionary principles rather than presenting original ideas. Because it is trying to wedge open some artificial gaps for a god to fit into. This is not how science works. Intelligent
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design has no ability whatsoever to discredit evolutionary biology, but even if it could, that would not substantiate intelligent design in the slightest. It’s never “your theory is wrong so mine is right”. Each theory must stand on its own merit, not that intelligent design qualifies as a theory in the first place. A new model must have at least as much explanatory power as what it attempts to replace. There is no paradigm shift where good science is rejected and replaced
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with absolutely nothing. New science must have more explanatory power, more predictive power, account for more observations, require fewer assumptions, and provide a program for further research. Intelligent design does absolutely none of these things. It’s just preachers lying about science in front of stock images of laboratories to seem like they know what they’re talking about. Because they have no ability to discredit evolution, they have to use arguments from
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authority in the way of misleading quotations from figures who are actually respected. For example, Karl Popper, a preeminent philosopher of science, said in 1976: “Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory, but a metaphysical research program.” Creationists have quoted this statement ever since without noting that Popper, after improving his understanding of the biological literature, changed his interpretation to add the following: “I have changed my mind about
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the testability and logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation.” Popper was a highly influential philosopher of science, but he was not a biologist, so he never had any authority in the field of biology. He should not be presented as though his words can refute an entire field of science. But particularly devious is the omission of his revised stance after he became more knowledgeable on the topic.
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Why do they resort to misrepresenting Karl Popper or other figures like Stephen Jay Gould? It’s simple. There is not a single creationist or intelligent design proponent who is a respected member of any scientific or academic circle. This a problem for them, since they need to try and paint the picture that there is a serious discussion going on within academia surrounding these ideas. Teach the controversy! In reality, among actual experts, there is no controversy.
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Creationism is not science. It is exclusively preachers, and propaganda peddlers working at nefarious think tanks, denying basic evolutionary biology. Actual biologists, even devout ones, are not like this. The handful of figures they try to point to that are involved in academia that support creationism are always speaking outside of their field, and either paid to lie or admit that they are specifically placing blind faith in biblical scripture above empirical evidence.
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There is no scientist that uses geological data to determine that the Earth is young. There are at best one or two who are credentialed but admit that they ignore data in favor of their faith, so their scientific authority is compromised and they should not be referenced as any more of an authority than a preacher or your neighbor. These sad examples of wasted intellect have fallen prey to Morton’s demon, which lets some science into their brains and blocks the rest, so they
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present themselves as highly science-minded, learning all about different kinds of minerals and other concepts, but then block out anything that can dethrone their faith-based worldview. And with the creationist preachers themselves, these are barely real people. They exist as the personification of the confirmation bias of their flocks. They have a script that has been debunked a thousand times, which they keep repeating over and over again anyway, because their targets
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ignore the refutations and don’t understand them in the first place. When given an opportunity to expose such a figure, rebuttals must be made as intelligible as humanly possible to maximize the chances of getting through to somebody. Dogs always produce dogs seems intuitive, and technically isn’t even wrong. It must be explained to people how this statement does not contradict evolution. Each creationist talking point must be hammered down to a nub from all directions. They
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must not be allowed to gish gallop, they must be backed into a corner and brought to submission. When all other options are exhausted, preachers will use their Hail Mary play. With no ability to substantiate their script, they will simply exclaim that evolution is like a religion because it’s not testable or repeatable. Once again, this is ridiculous. We already discussed the types of observations and predictions that evolution can make. But creationists
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are specifically complaining about the fact that we did not watch the entire history of life on Earth with 3D glasses and popcorn. Of course we didn’t. It doesn’t matter. In science, we don’t need to watch or even be able to see things in order to learn about them. We can’t see atoms, yet we do chemistry. We can only see a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, yet every portion has some practical application. We did not watch billions of years of evolution,
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but we can make reliable inferences based on the data available to us, which we have discussed throughout this series. Imagine a crime scene. Does a detective say: “Aww shucks, I missed it! I guess I’ll go home.” No, they begin to gather clues. Fingerprints, blood samples, and so forth. These clues will help elucidate what happened and hopefully identify a culprit. This is an empirical approach to solving a case, just like a scientist would behave with their
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particular research question. “You weren’t there” is not an argument against science, ever. With no actual argument to make, this is why creationists and intelligent design proponents are forced to lie about the evidence supporting evolution. It is undeniably consistent beyond reasonable doubt, so they have to erase it in order to ensnare their targets. They lie about the duration and nature of
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the Cambrian explosion. They lie about the lack of transitional fossils. They lie about high school level genetics concepts. Dishonesty is their only recourse, because the evidence is overwhelming. Nevertheless, cognitive biases keep creationists in this mental space. They will display an unreasonable level of skepticism towards the scientific process and the entire body of scientific knowledge, while displaying absolute blind credulity towards scripture.
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If a creationist starts saying “you weren’t there”, or playing the “how do you know” game, you can turn it back on them and their scripture on a dime, press harder than they press, and see how quickly they become desperate to change the subject. “How do you know” is the most important question in science, while it is absolutely forbidden in religion. The reason it is forbidden is that what creationists actually fundamentally believe
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is completely incompatible with logic. It is actually breathtaking how ridiculous it all is when you really stop and think about it. If they are Young Earth creationists, they believe in a god who made millions of different types of organisms just to wipe almost all of them out, including almost all humans. Why? Do omniscient, omnipotent deities make mistakes? If they believe in common descent with divine intervention, they believe in a deity that has to keep tinkering over
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time because he can’t figure it out on the first try. A powerful deity would be able to design a universe with the right conditions for life to arise and just let the whole thing play out. Instead the creationist god is sitting in the ocean putting together a trilobite because he’s dissatisfied with what has showed up thus far. Is this really the all-powerful deity that should elicit fear and obedience from us? Then there are those who think the fossil record
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is a trick from the devil or a test from god to see if we will reject our own logical faculties in favor of blind faith in a god that makes no attempt to substantiate his own existence. And those of us who do not submit with so little reason, we are punished eternally for being as smart as he made us on purpose? It all falls apart so quickly. If he doesn’t know what we’re going to do, he’s not omniscient. If he knows what we will do but isn’t in control of it,
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he's not omnipotent. If he knows what we will do and made us to do those things, only to torture us eternally for what we did not even decide for ourselves to do, he’s not all-loving. At the very least we can reject the god of the Abrahamic religions on this basis alone. It doesn’t mean no god exists, but we can start ruling out some popular versions pretty easily. But that is why creationists are so insistent on the idea that science and logic
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must be reinterpreted to fit scripture, never that scripture should be reinterpreted to fit science and logic. The scripture is the ultimate authority, and asserting it over reason is the only way to retain any power over someone’s thought process. The moment critical thinking creeps in, it has to be shut down. People must be told that everyone is engaging in blind faith, not just them, and they chose the right thing to put their faith in. The ancient words of
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ignorant men are more reliable than what we can personally and empirically ascertain to be true in this modern era, and anyone who tells you otherwise is the devil. This is the attitude that can make it so challenging to debate creationists, whether they are genuinely misled and defending their faith, or they are bad faith actors projecting certainty in order to ensnare more followers. Their confidence, their fake knowledge, you must poke a hole in it.
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You have to identify their weak point and press on it. Every time they change topics, bring them back. What do you mean the probability of a protein forming by chance is such and such number? How did you calculate that? Based on what parameters? They know very well they can’t answer, they are just regurgitating a talking point that sounds convincing to the uneducated at face value. So when they inevitably gish gallop, cut it off. Loudly point out that they’re obfuscating.
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Redirect to your line of inquiry. Why can’t you answer this question? Any creationist who makes it a point to debate regularly is undoubtedly dishonest and deserves this merciless treatment. Only by showing how clueless they are about the entire body of scientific knowledge can one expose their lack of authority and disempower their rhetoric, which will always turn to morality. They need high stakes, so they pretend evolution is tied to moral bankruptcy, linked to Nazis,
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eugenics, and so forth. This is all a script of lies. Altruism is the product of evolution. Nazism was a Christian movement. As philosopher of biology Robert J. Richards pointed out, leading Nazi theorists specifically rejected Darwinian evolution because of its materialistic character. Whatever they bring up in this arena, it’s total bullshit. Some people do bad things, and many of those people are religious, the end. The most egregious misrepresentation
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is the notion that morality is impossible without a deity. But we exist with morality, and there is no evidence for a deity, so clearly no deity is needed for morality to exist. Morality may not be objective, as we quickly realize with people having different notions of what is moral. But atheists are at least as moral as religious people, and it does not contradict evolutionary principles whatsoever. Take a look at bees and ants. Animal behavior is complex. Survival of
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the fittest doesn’t mean kill everyone around you. Sometimes it means form cooperative networks and take care of one another. Whatever maximizes the probability of survival and reproduction, and consequently whatever causes certain genomes to perpetuate, that’s all there is to it. But in general, creationists will always spew this script about morality to raise the stakes, and they will always put forth a ridiculous persecution complex. Everyone is trying to stifle
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the poor Christians. They’ve been marginalized all along, especially among the nasty, godless scientists who are threatened by their purity and faith. They can’t handle our truth, and they’re trying to keep god out of the curriculum. In reality it’s creationists who are allergic to truth, and putting religion in public school science curricula is specifically unconstitutional. Scientists can be religious, and many are, but religion is not science.
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Creationists are not part of science, they don’t learn science, they don’t do science, and real scientists don’t waste a single second thinking about them, they’re too busy doing science. Nevertheless, some creationists really do believe they are in a spiritual battle to convert everyone, to save them all from hellfire. To them, this justifies their desire to infringe on the constitution, to infringe on individual rights. They really think it’s the ultimate
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truth. And they have the right to believe these things in the privacy of their home or church, but when they try to wield political power to inflict these beliefs on others, they’ve crossed the line. Politely or not, they must be stopped, because it’s a slippery slope. In summary, creationism by any name, even intelligent design, is nothing but superstition and a tool of oppression. Humanity will be better off once
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we can help everyone leave it behind. This is not just in the interest of rational thought, but the safety of society. Blind faith is a form of subservience, and those who grow accustomed to subservience will accept authoritarian rule. When of a religious flavor, authoritarianism is called theocracy, and we are already seeing the first signs of this in America. The rollback of human rights on the basis of religious reasoning, the attempt at shoving religion into public school
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science classes, these are the first steps. I’ve outlined this danger in other content so I won’t get too deep with it here, but it is a genuine battle that is being fought, and disillusioning as many of their captive minds as possible is a directive of critical importance. A key aspect of this fight is the promotion of general science literacy. That’s why I continue to make academic tutorials in as many subjects as possible, to offer a resource
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people can use to gather the general knowledge that renders them immune to these influences. But I also have created other content dismantling the specific propaganda that is disseminated by organizations like Discovery Institute. All of this content is linked in the description, so if you found this series useful and informative, consider continuing your learning with some of these other resources. Whether you seek to debate some creationists
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or simply convert a few family members over to the side of reason, I’ll be rooting for you.
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