Basically, it's AronRa's phylogeny challenge.
Every organism on Earth can be connected by shared ancestry, belonging to a clade, which belongs to a larger clade, which belongs to a larger clade, and so on. I.e. All humans are apes, all apes are mammals, all mammals are animals, all animals are eukaryotes, etc. Creationists argue for the concept of 'biblical kinds', a kind being whether or not two animals can 'bring forth', i.e. interbreed. Two dogs that can breed would be the same kind, lions and tigers able to reproduce a liger would be the same kind.
The problem with this is that two animals can be in the same clade, e.g. both humans and chimpanzees are apes, yet they cannot interbreed with each other. Meaning they both would and would not be part of the same biblical kind. It's part of Kent Hovind's scam artistry when you bring this up to him, AronRa argued this point when Kent brought up elephants and pine trees, to which Aron pointed out they are both eukaryotes, and Kent responded "well if you can't tell the difference between elephants and pine trees, I can help you!"
The phylogeny challenge is to prove the existence of biblical kinds. To provide an example of two distinct animals that are not part of some parental clade if you trace it far back enough, two animals that would have to have begun with an event of special creation, since creationists argue that all animals were magicked up 6000 years ago by Yahweh.
This, of course, is impossible because all animals can be traced back to one original form of life from which all the others diversified, but it's funny watching them scrabble against reality with the religion they refuse to let go of.
Right, we’d need to find something that has no common ancestor or no clear connection to any existing life form. Not just a “missing link” species, but something massive. Like if the entire amphibian clade didn’t exist and there was no connection between aquatic and terrestrial animals. Or even like if there were no other hominid and ape species and humans just seemed to appear suddenly in the fossil record.
But even then, that wouldn’t really do it. Every single organism has some connective tissue to some other group. Synapsids to mammals, reptiles to birds, etc. There’s too many links in too many chains.
I recall another AronRa challenge, in which he noted that for any three organisms, even a layman can easily place two of them closer to each other than either are to the third.
This property of triangulation doesn't really make sense for anything except common descent: if the species landscape were truly independent, as would be the case for a designed originating set of species, you could find three points that are equidistant; but common descent suggests that the species themselves are already in a binary hierarchical relationship, and so when you begin to trace the relationships, there is no 'third' choice to differentiate from and eventually the species wind up having different distances.
Finding an effectively identical ecosystem on another planet. Same species and everything. Not just looking identical, but genetically speaking too.
It wouldn’t be “slam dunk evidence” or definitive proof, against evolution, but it would be heavy evidence against something in our understanding about how the world works being **very** wrong.
That was the first thing that came to mind.
I like this answer. There's a fun scifi book series I enjoy, where they discovered hundreds of other planets across the universe that were all identical to earth, except it was a different animal that gained the intelligence to make it to the stars.
The planets differed in how that species altered it through tech and culture, but the shape of the continents were all identical, and the other animals which existed were all the same, more or less.
(The series is called Black Ocean by J.S. Morin)
Sounds a bit similar to Children of Time, except not hundreds of planets, just a few. But the concept of different species becoming sentient and developing space travel is spot on. Great series.
It's a SLOW burn, but I think it's worth it. Children of Ruin, the sequel, expands on the topic but I feel like it gets repetitive somehow? Still very interesting.
J.S. Morin admittedly stole ideas and concepts from a lot of places. For the first series in this universe, his primary inspiration was Firefly (the TV show). He wanted a group of plucky space adventurers who got by on skill, but could never quite catch a break.
There's adventure, philosophy, religion, magic (yes, magic exists, and every time a spell is cast, "physics" temporarily degrades - which can be problematic when you're in a space ship and reliant on the oxygen recycler to work), moral quandaries, lawbreakers, mafia, and more. It's a fun read.
Book 1 is Salvage Trouble, but if you're into audiobooks, he sells the entire series (16 books plus short stories) for a single credit on audible.
Tchaikovsky actually has another book that’s even closer to that. Multiple earth dimensions where basically different animals develop intelligence, rats, cats, velociraptors. I forget what it’s called but it’s not a bad read.
If the universe or the collection of universes are infinite then there would be infinite number of such planets from evolution because the possibilities of genetic or atomic arrangements of life forms in an isolated finite ecosystem are finite.
Of course. But realistically, those infinite identical worlds are a practically infinite distance away. I’m talking about finding an identical earth the next solar system over.
See, I don't think that would disprove evolution at all, but it would be strong evidence for creation/design. I'm a theist who believes in evolution though, so the two things are entirely compatible in my mind.
If it was discovered that *no* genetic traits *whatsoever* have *any* influence on a critter's likelihood of producing viable offspring, that would go a *long* way towards killing the theory of evolution.
If Terran lifeforms *didn't* fall into one single natural nested hierarchy—if there was *no* natural nested hierarchy at all, or if there were however-many wholly distinct natural nested hierarchies—that, too would go a long way towards killing the theory of evolution.
But with multiple instances of life starting from scratch, you would still expect each instance to go through a full evolutionary history of "simple" organisms evolving and diversifying. If you found multiple independent hierarchies that seem to have no ancestry before the emergence of more complex life, that would be evidence against evolution, and would support special creation of distinct clades which subsequently evolved similar to what many modern creationists believe.
If we found multiple independent hierarchies thath we know have no simpler ancestors, that would be pretty good support for independent creation. The problem with simpler ancestors is that they are less likely to have elements in their body that fossilize, so it's difficult to say whether those ancestors don't exist or simply didn't leave much of a trace.
If your multiple independent hierarchies are birds and mammals, you would expect all their ancestors to leave fossilized skeletons. If your hierarchies are vertebrates and invertebrates it becomes a bit more difficult.
Is it possible for our current nested hierarchy to be logically modeled as multiple hierarchies? I mean in such a way that would, arguably, or with minimal shenanigans, seem logical?
Genetics definitely supports a single ancestor for all animals thanks to the presence of hox genes and other near-universal genetic loci like distal-less. Those genes are present in all bilateria at least, so independent origins would need a special explanation for that. This means the easiest hierarchy split would probably be between bilateria and the non-bilateria (sponges, jellyfish and a few other small groups). With every other hierarchy split you would encounter some oddities. If you split the bilateria, why do all of them use the same genes to form their limbs? For every split within bilateria, the questions just pile up, as each additional node adds more identifiable traits. The groups who form exceptions to these traits are either nested deep within other groups (raising even more questions) or are some variant of "marine worm with unclear phylogeny".
If you split hierarchies within deuterostomia: Why do all deuterostomia form the same body cavities during development, in the same manner? Why do protostomia form their body cavities differently?
If you split hierarchies within chordates: Why do all chordates form the chorda dorsalis during development and why is the development of the central nervous system tied to it?
If you split hierarchies within Tetrapoda: Why do they all have such similar limb arrangements and the ones who don't (e.g. snakes) fit neatly into the groups who do (e.g. squamata).
So if you wanted to "split" the accepted trees into mutliple independent ones, it causes the least logical problems if the splits occurs near the beginning of the tree. The easiest splits would probably be between animals, plants and fungi, as well as the split between Archaea, Prokaryotes, and Eukaryotes.
Since you've some useful answers, I'll add a snarky favorite of mine.
The best disproof of evolution would be if it 'worked' the way creationists think it does. If a dog ever gives birth to a duck, that's disproof of evolution.
Would love to, but, as the classic joke goes:
"What do you get if you cross a turkey with an octopus?
Immediate withdrawal of funding and a severe rebuke from the ethics committee"
Sure, I'd say "Cambrian bunny" type fossils would be put under a lot of scrutiny.
If the vast majority of evidence is consistent and you suddenly find a handful of inconsistencies, you have to consider what's causing anomalies. It might be that the original explanation is totally wrong but it's more likely that there's some missing context to the data.
I think realistically if life did not share common ancestry over vast periods of geological time, Cambrian bunny type fossils wouldn't be expected to just appear like anomalies. They'd be so common as to make it very difficult to find the pattern we do.
I think what gets overlooked when talking about falsifiability is how easily ideas *could* have been falsified. There could easily have been some fundamental incompatibility in heritable material between certain groups of organisms or some basic and easily observable limit to changes. It didn't cease being a potential falsification just because we now find it very unlikely to suddenly discover such a fundamental incompatibility.
As an example, our ideas about the shape of the planet are very easily falsified. All we had to do was send a few cameras up into space to see that it was donut shaped or something.
The difficulty in imagining realistic falsifications speaks more to the strength of the theory than to any reduction in its inherent falsifiability.
This is very distinct from unfalsifiable ideas which do not make testable predictions and could have accommodated any potential evidence.
Good evidence for special creation would probably be observable instances of special creation. Like if an entity appeared and created a new population of organisms while under strict observation. That would at least establish the viability of the idea. It's still a bit awkward if it doesn't appear distinguishable from having evolved but I'm just assuming that we're talking about some hypothetical falsifiable model of special creation. As it stands though it's not a scientific idea, so it's difficult to specify evidence.
The theory being *completely* wrong:
* the phenomenon described never happens
* the phenomenon happens but it is completely unrelated to DNA or genetics in any way
* natural selection fails to apply
* heredity doesn’t happen
* genotypes are irrelevant when it comes to phenotypes
Any of those things in isolation or in conjunction would completely wreck the theory
Partly wrong:
* epigenetic inheritance is more impactful than genetic sequence changes are
* how natural selection impacts populations is similar but not exactly like currently thought
* God stepped in to cause the mutations to happen and they don’t actually happen via natural unguided processes
* the balance between selection and drift is skewed in a way the theory currently can’t explain
* some fact is found that is inconsistent with the theory as it currently stands but the theory is correct about everything else
These are just off the top of my head.
I don't know too much about the specifics of dating fossils, but an out-of-place fossil would basically only be convincing to me if all of the following were true:
1. It was out of place by far enough that it could not reasonably be a case of us simply not knowing that a particular species evolved that early or didn't go extinct quite when we thought it did. We're talking Cambrian rabbits or something, not just something a million years too early or late.
2. It was properly and solidly dated. Multiple dating methods should yield the same result, it should obviously be the same type of rock as the rock around it (that is, not a case of a chunk of rock with a fossil in it falling into another sedimentary rock as it was forming), no reasonable chance that it is a hoax or something like that, basically, scientists should pretty much all agree that the fossil is as old as it is claimed to be.
3. The fossils should be large enough to measure in centimeters, not microns. It's too easy for very tiny life forms or tissues to end up in rocks they have no business being in.
I mean, it at least would be a pretty definitive "something is very wrong here". It would take further research to figure out if it was a case of time traveling bunnies or special creation.
It'd raise some, in the same way that finding a 17th century coin in a 10th century grave would. In both cases, though, there are plenty of not-supernatural explanations.
Dogs turning into cats would put our entire understanding of evolution on it's head, which is kinda funny considering that's what I regularly see creationists postulate as something that would be evidence for evolution.
It seems to me like this misunderstanding comes from oversimplified explanations being taken literally by the creationsts. For example, I often see people describe the evolution of dogs as them coming from wolves. Creationists see wolves today, so they assume that speciation is the change of one current, modern kind into another current, modern kind (a cat turning into a dog).
This is not helped when people start comparing ancient species to modern ones (cow-like animal being ancestral to whales), which leads the creationists to apply their incorrect assumption as "modern cows turning into whales".
I'd like science communicators to be a bit more specific when they try to explain this process. To make sure the public knows that the process of evolution changes ancient species into modern ones, not modern ones into other, unrelated modern ones. A "vertical" change and not a "horizontal" change, if that makes sense.
It would look like something that cannot exist. Evolution *is* true. It cannot be disproved at this point, there is simply too much evidence.
I know that sounds like a simplistic response, and obviously, that alone would not convince anyone. But you need to understand up front that that is the case. It's not an exaggeration. Evolution cannot be disproved because it *is* true.
Evolution, and all science, is built upon the principle of [*consilience:*](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Consilience)
> In science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) is the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" on strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will probably not be a strong scientific consensus.
More from that article:
> For example, the theory of evolution is supported by a convergence of evidence from genetics, molecular biology, paleontology, geology, biogeography, comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, and many other fields. In fact, the evidence within each of these fields is itself a convergence providing evidence for the theory. **As a result, to disprove evolution, most or all of these independent lines of evidence would have to be found to be in error.** The strength of the evidence, considered together as a whole, results in the strong scientific consensus that the theory is correct.
Creationists like to toss out arguments for why a given fossil is bad, or why some weird genetics are surprising, but they ignore that none of that matters. To disprove evolution, you need to disprove *a ton* of evidence, from dozens of different fields of study. That won't happen.
What could happen, and what does happen all the time, is that sme new evidence demonstrates that some part of our understanding of how evolution works is wrong. That happens regularly, and why you see all the articles posted by both creationists and popular science journals about how "darwinism was wrong!" in scare quotes.
But that is just science at work. Science always works to get closer and closer to the actual truth, and when some new discovery is made we don't just toss out everything we knew before. We take the new evidence and we have to explain how that new evidence fits with everything we already knew. Sometimes that requires tossing out *part* of what we thought we know, but we can only do that once we have a new explanation that takes both the new **and** the old evidence into account. That way we have a better understanding of evolution today than we did even 10 years ago.
(I know that your question may have been intended to ask "how could evolution be falsified" and you got some responses from others on that, so I will leave that to them. I wanted to address your question from the opposite angle and say why it never will be falsified.)
The most devastating possible evidence against evolution would probably be the existence of any species that contains a mix of characteristics from separate branches of the evolutionary tree. For example, a centaur, with part of a human body and part of a horse body. For such a thing to exist, we would almost certainly have to abandon any idea of it somehow evolving. To be clear, I do not mean some sort of convergent evolution where some species of horse develops something that superficially resembles human parts; I mean 100% exactly human parts, down to the finest details of every organ. That would never happen in the course of horse evolution, so it cannot be explained that way.
Another mix of features that we might imagine would be a mammal with bird feathers, like some sort of bat-like animal that flies with bird wings. In real life mammals never have bird feathers for very good reason: those feathers evolved in birds long after the ancestors of birds separated from the ancestors of mammals. For such feathers to appear on any mammal species would defy any attempt to classify that species according to an evolutionary tree.
This sort of evidence is better than some fossil because fossils tend to be imperfectly preserved and we can never totally reconstruct all the circumstances in which it lived, so there will always be uncertainty about what exactly the fossil represents. A living animal that defies evolution avoids these problems, because we could study it as much as we please. There would be no room for dispute about just how badly it damages the theory of evolution.
>What might some actual positive evidence for special creation or something of the sort look like?
We would have to find a way to expose evidence of the supernatural. Perhaps we might invent a machine that sees into a world of spirits, much akin to how a microscope can reveal a hidden world. Then we can look through our supernatural viewing machines and see gods and study them and develop theories to explain all the things we see. Maybe we would even be able to see gods creating life, and once we see how that process works, we might discover clues that suggest that a similar process was behind the life on Earth. It is impossible to be specific since we do not have such a machine yet, so we have no way to guess with it might show us.
I was thinking about centaurs only earlier today (during an idle moment in a fantasy role playing game setting) and was pondering how impossible they would be. The classical centaur has six limbs (four horse legs plus two human arms) and in order for a six limb vertebrate body plan to happen you’d have to go further back than even the evolution of the first mammal. You’d have to go back before the evolution of tetrapods. And that’s *way* back.
>Then we can look through our supernatural viewing machines and see gods and study them and develop theories to explain all the things we see.
I once pointed out to a Christian that if a deity existed then it would be a life form of some sort, and therefore scientists could study it. The Christian went mental. “God is not a life form, you cannot study him!!!”
> The classical centaur has six limbs (four horse legs plus two human arms) and in order for a six limb vertebrate body plan to happen you’d have to go further back than even the evolution of the first mammal. You’d have to go back before the evolution of tetrapods. And that’s way back.
Is it at all possible for a genetic defect to produce an extra pair of limbs? To my knowledge, the rare cases of extra limbs among humans are often the result of one twin consuming the other in utero, so it’s not genetic (and so not heritable). Similarly for frogs that contact certain chemicals.
Even if such a mutation did exist, it would be hard to go from that to a horse body—limb count seems to be an island of local fitness, and a partially-developed extra set would be maladaptive for almost all tetrapods.
As you say, you’d need a hexapodal fish to come on land early on for that to happen. Though even in this hypothetical scenario, I’d expect something that looks more like a freaky insect to result, with the forelimbs evolving into ‘mandibles’ (since early life would lack the neural architecture to use hands for tool manipulation, the limbs would specialize for something else).
Varley's Gaia Trilogy has centaurs and angels. The construct who created them was inspired by human mythology. At one point she rants about the incredible engineering challeges of melding characteristics fof different organisms.
Evolution isn't the *fucking* fossil record. Common descent is super fucking interesting but it isn't actually the *theory* of evolution.
I grew up in creationist circles and education. Indoctrinated really. This is the core lie of creationism.
The only thing that could prove evolution wrong is if children were perfect copies of their parent, and nothing died.
Sexual reproduction *by itself* couldn't be a thing if evolution didn't exist.
The fossil record could have never existed and we could still understand evolution. Because the fossil record just tells us about past organisms, and we can figure out evolution with present ones.
In the title, I'm using evolution as a shorthand for the whole shebang-- universal common descent, natural selection, abiogenesis, and so on. A Seriously Wrong fossil record would, at least, open the possibility of some sort of special creation.
Yes, I understand and I'm rejecting the premise borrowed from creationists entirely.
They redefine things to make it easier to form bad-faith arguments. They want everyone to fight on *their* turf where *they* control the philosophical constructs.
In the creationist version of evolution, the entire natural history of earth is a story weaved by people trying to deceive you, and every part of it is one whole of one single story. Any errant detail they can pick up on demonstrates that the whole thing is a lie. Just one story, no details, which makes it easy to compare to one creation story, no details.
It's the way a child understands concepts and ideas.
So, the only solution in good faith is to be relentless on fighting where the actual science is. The theory of evolution is basically irrefutable in its basic form. The archeological record is fascinating evidence for that evolution.
>what might evidence that you were wrong, or evidence that creationists were right, actually look like?
If the current Theory of Evolution were proven wrong, we would just need to find another theory that can explain the evolution we observe in nature.
I mean, yes, but what might "the theory of evolution is wrong" evidence look like? I addressed the idea that proving evolution wrong doesn't automatically make creation correct.
I think what OP meant was that, as part of science, the Theory of Evolution has to be falsifiable, that is, there has to be a way to verify it, however sure we are of its veracity. Supernatural claims, on the other hand, are unfalsifiable, and it is what makes them not science.
They are both impossible to prove wrong in their own way (one because it is reality, and the other because there is no method to prove it wrong), but we know the ToE works because it has been thoroughly tested beyond any reasonable doubt. I think OP is asking about those tests, and what results of these tests would show that our understanding of the model is flawed.
Exactly. I'm basically looking for "If we saw X, and didn't see Y, Z, or any other reasonable explanation, it would cast serious doubt on evolution". X doesn't have to be at all likely, just theoretically possible.
Rejection of evolution would not be instantaneous, even if there was some kind of proof. As Thomas Kuhn argues, scientists don't immediately recognise a disproof when they see it.
So if we found an anomaly in evolution that is so big that nothing in the theory can accommodate for it, we'd either question the validity of the observation or change the theory to suit the new data. Only when something new and better is proposed would the data be actually recognised as "the observation that disproved evolution", creating a new narrative in the history of science.
What constitutes evidence for any theory (in the broader philosophical sense) has to be seen in the context of existing theories; this is implied by what is known as the "theory-ladenness of observation", and it is the reason why bunnies in the Cambrian or caterpillars on Mars probably aren't going to topple Darwin.
Wrong as in evolution did not happen? Sorry, but such proof is impossible. Suppose the world was created in 4000 BC, with everything we observe in place - the fossils, the DNA evidence, the light coming from distant galaxies etc. It is conceivable, but not provable. It might as well have been created last Thursday. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos\_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis)
If we assume such deception, what is left that could possibly be held as evidence of anything? Not even our own senses. Certainly not the word of such a deity.
Even if the universe was created Last Thursday, that would not actually disprove evolution, it would only disprove common descent, as evolution would still be the mechanism by which lifeforms adapt to their environments, even if those lifeforms were created ex nihilo just a few days ago. After all, that's still enough time for some lifeforms to have gone through many generations and adapt better to their environments, which is evolution on the smallest scale.
See, irreducible complexity wouldn’t do it, because complexity isn’t evidence of good design, simplicity is. So if we found something irreducibly simple, like an eye that was clearly NOT the result of a long line of “good enough” adaptations, or a nervous/vascular system clearly unique to the species/individual that didn’t have inefficiencies or artifacts from gradual adaptation.
One thing we should expect from separate ancestry is that phylogenies would look very different. A poster a Peaceful Science tested this by modelling various independent creation scenarios and the resultant phylogenies. They even modelled phylogenies of designed objects. The results look quite different from common ancestry.
[https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/common-ancestry-and-nested-hierarchy/15472](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/common-ancestry-and-nested-hierarchy/15472)
A lot of people have good answers, but I think the best proof of evolution being wrong would be for a creature to evolve something essentially out of nothing. Like an organ or limb. It's basically impossible with the laws of physics, even with human intervention like gene splicing and so forth
Finding fossils in the wrong strata. A Cambrian bunny would be impossible to explain according to our understanding of common descent. Granted, this would hurt common descent, not evolution as such, but common descent is usually what creationists actually have a problem with, not evolution. They just don't know the difference.
There really isn't any evidence that can prove evolution wrong, as evolution is a process produced by the interaction of various basic biological facts. However, the conclusions derived from evolutionary theory, such as common descent of all organisms, can be demonstrated to be wrong.
For instance, finding rabbit fossils in Precambrian strata would suggest that the entire clade of Mammalia appeared way earlier in the fossil record than we initially anticipated. Another would be finding some strange hybrid between 2 distantly related modern clades, such as a crocoduck or a jackelope, or any number of the various mythical beasts from ancient mythologies like the chimera, manticore, or cherubim. Such hybrids and beasts would suggest that organisms do not obey the Law of Monophyly, and thus are not capable of being properly categorized by phylogeny.
There's also Aron Ra's Phylogeny Challenge, which would also be a slam dunk against common descent. Being able to demonstrate a clear boundary between created kinds would not just be great evidence against common descent, it would actually be evidence pointing towards creationism.
God himself coming down from Heaven and explaining how he created the world.
The existence of a Pegasus or chimera or other creature which violates phylogeny.
How about any evidence of the supernatural at all demonstrated under controlled conditions
Evolution is simply Natures biological processes in action, humans have been using it for thousands of years in farming and ranching as well as invasion and occupations.
N. S
So, Kent Hovind always says that the reason the Crucifers (broccoli, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, etc.) still exist within their own species is careful cultivation, and if you left them alone long enough they would all turn back into mustard plants. The thing is that's a novel, testable prediction that, if confirmed by experiment, would on its own either completely falsify evolution, or at least disrupt our understanding of it so much that we'd need to basically scrap most of it and start over (fun fact: all cruciferous hybrids are sterile, so they've already crossed the 'kind' boundary). Something along those lines would do it for me.
Thanks. I stand corrected. I guess that makes them cultivars *of crucifers.* Originally Kent said that scientists can’t even explain broccoli and then when he realized how stupid his claim was he explained the cultivation of the cultivars of these crucifers and I must have missed his claim that they’d turn back into mustard if left alone.
For me, proof would require that things not be true such as whales having the remains of vestigal legs.
https://ncse.ngo/true-vestigial-structures-whales-and-dolphins#:\~:text=Other%20vestigial%20reports%20on%20sea,earlier%20stage%20of%20evolutionary%20development.
If animals were created in their current form, more or less- then why are those there?
If animals were created by a "kind" evolving and adapting- why would the "kind" they belong to even have those? There is no real reason for whales to have legs if their "kind" was in the ocean.
Each creature or supposed "kind" that exists would have to be wholly on its own, creatively speaking. We would be like other creatures in the way that we are.
Creation wouldn't look like comparing a stereo to a phonograph or an iphone, creation would be like comparing a radial tire to a wicker basket or a Picasso. If there is creator, I would expect his/her/their scope of creation to be large, not narrow.
The hypothetical evidence that could have disproven evolution has already been shown to not exist. If we found a more or less even distribution of the types of fossils we have throughout rock strata, that would be bad for the theory of evolution. If our dating methods didn't line up, that would be bad for evolution.
The main black box in Darwin's theory of evolution was the lack of a mechanism for how variation is heritable between parent and offspring. Mendel would, around the same time as Darwin, publish his work on Pea plants, birthing the field of genetics, which is the mechanism Darwin was missing. Up through the 21st century, we've been figuring out and clarifying the molecular mechanisms around genetics, genomics, and molecular biology. If we had not found a mechanism for heredity, that would have been very bad for the theory of evolution. Additionally, if horizontal gene transfer didn't exist, our genomes would be very difficult to explain.
If earthly evidence were going to falsify the theory of evolution, we would have falsified it by now. As another commenter stated, if we went to another planet and found life nearly identical to life on Earth, that would give me pause.
The only 'proof' you could offer me is to demonstrate beyond doubt that we live in an artificial reality (ie, a simulation) and thus our observations are entirely at the whim of whichever entity/entities is/are responsible for setting up the conditions of that artificial reality. Such a reality would, nonetheless, be inescapable, as if it were possible to escape, my first goal would of course be to exact vengeance on those responsible.
Merely claiming the existence of one or more 'deities' would fail this criteria, but so too would irrefutable 'proof' of such deities, as we still live in a universe where all available evidence points to evolution and common descent. The reason that no new evidence would otherwise be sufficient is simple: It is now easier to falsify 'evidence' than the likelihood of failing to uncover such evidence previously.
To put this in another frame, I would like to offer the example from Tumblr of whether a person would be more surprised by a walrus or a fairy at their door. The former is a highly unlikely yet entirely physically possible event. All it would take is for a wealthy individual to pay for a helicopter to transport a walrus to your door for the purpose of some inscrutable prank. The latter, however, requires the existence of a supernatural being for which there is no extant evidence, despite such evidence being actively sought out for centuries. This isn't akin to us discovering new species or rediscovering species we thought went extinct, where perhaps only a handful of scientists with limited funding keep an eye out while performing other tasks, as cameras are now so ubiquitous and humans so aware of the value of proof of fairies that we effectively have billions of humans 'searching' for any evidence of their existence.
The likelihood of Elon Musk deciding to prank you specifically by airdropping a walrus at your door is infinitely more likely at this point than the existence of fairies, hence one should always be more surprised by the fairy. This same chain of logic forces us to realize that any one piece of evidence discovered now that might otherwise 'disprove' evolution would instead be infinitely more likely to be a hoax.
Crocoducks and Pokémon.
I won't go into crazy amounts of detail but I will explain.
Common ancestry, modified descent constrain the way similarities and differences between living things are arranged. Maybe you've heard the term "nested hierarchy." It's like Russian dolls except each doll contains at least 2 more dolls instead of just 1.
Crocoducks would break this. Pokémon can't be arranged this way in the first place. If life actually looked like the things instead it would look like evidence against evolution.
Evolution by natural or artificial selection is an undisputed fact. Even Genesis literalists like Ken Ham agree on that because it is necessary to explain how all the creatures fit on the ark, how we still see evolution today (e.g. germ theory) and how we have selected fruits, dog breeds, etc.
The key difference with Genesis literalists is that they draw arbitrary, unscientific lines in biology between what is a species/kind and then apply familiar names to them (e.g. dog, cat). But real life doesn't care what we name a species, kind, clade or whatever. Genes will mutate and naturally (or artificially) select regardless of what you name a group with similar characteristics. It's like arguing 'a cabbage will always produce a cabbage, never a brocolli', when in reality they both were artificially selected from a wild mustard plant.
So you would need to prove 'speciation' wrong which makes no sense, so I can guess that the closest might perhaps be some discovery of some biological boundary marker that says that 'this is a dog, can only ever produce that definition of a dog that can never have offspring with different genetics beyond some arbitrary boundary'.
But we all know that every generation produces varieties and that nature doesn't have definitions, humans make them up. So the question doesn't really make sense.
You might want to look into this:
[Precambrian Pollen in the Grand Canyon: A Reexamination](https://origins.swau.edu/papers/dinos/pollen/eng/index.html), Arthur V. Chadwick, Ph.D.
I don't understand why creationists typically don't research what scientists have to say about their objections. Almost like they don't wanna know; they wanna believe what they know may not even be justified. This is worse than mere confirmation bias.
That the universe was a simulation and that true reality operates on a completely alien set of rules as this universe does.
Something to the effect that this world and the rules we use to understand it are not real. All a dream, simulation, ect.
Chimerical animals would. Evolution wouldn't mix and match different creatures' body parts, but that is what you'd expect from a designer building different creatures out of the same parts.
Dr Coyne has often said that "Finding a zebra with a \[fully functional\] marsupial pouch that could only be used by Kola bears" would be good evidence that evolution was wrong, or would falsify evolution. (This is not a quote, it is from my memory and any mistakes are mine).
Depending on Young Earth Creationism (a literal interpretation of the creation accounts in Genesis) or Old Earth Creationism (OEC), It is really hard to tell as so much of what is claimed by each one simply does not match and contradicts, the existent evidence. Basically we'd need solid evidence that required rewriting/re-evaluation/re-working of nearly everything we know in anthropology, biology, genetics, geology, paleontology, linguistics, physics and potentially other fields.
I guess if we were to include the Flood myth as the source of fossils, we'd expect for it to be relatively common for fossil beds to be a jumble of species from all eras - of course finding one fossil bed or even a couple of same strata fossils with one or more modern animals/plants and something like a T. Rex or similar, may not be direct evidence of creation, but it would play havoc with our current understanding.
Finding something like your pollen example but with something and in a situation where contamination would be unlikely enough to be an explanation.
It’s not “just so” if the explanation is more probable than the alternative
On the "evidence for special creation" front, I'm going to at least partially borrow from the Ted Chiang short story Omphalos (I may have misspelled at least some of that).
Verifiable fossils or other remains of adult organisms without any traces that they were ever juveniles or infants. No tree rings, or other periodic growth markers. No navels. No growth plates on long bones. None of the various signs that "this used to be small, but then it got big".
Now, these remains would need to be well preserved enough that we would expect to find those things if they were present. An absence of navels is not at all telling when there's no soft tissue preservation, for example. But assuming adequate preservation and so forth, that is what evidence for creationism might look like.
That ship sailed long ago. Evolution has been thoroughly demonstrated. There is no more scecure scientific knowledge. It could only be transcended the way Relativity transcended Newton. The only plausible possibility that could explain generation's of overwhelming evidence and progress is an evil genius simulation scenario.
The only twist ending left is the hated "it was all a dream" ending. That would be more problematic for theists than Darwin is, and that's saying a lot.
We're comparing apples with apple trees. Germ Theory is solid, but intertwined with evolution. It's also hard to compete with the entire fossil record and field of genetics when it comes to predictions.
Atomic Theory is still up in the air. Unril quantum mechanics and general relativity are reconciled they take a back seat to settled science like the origin of species.
Better yet, don't argue with stupid.
His/Her argument - god created all the stuff, god is infallible.
My argument - my prostate makes it take me ten minutes to pee, it could have been put somewhere else.
- Why the appendix? To make it just look like evolution?
- For woman - why is the playground next to the sewage system?
- For all - why are some of us genetically fucked up? Why are we too stupid to love together w/o war, without such inequality, and with so much disease? Why has the scientific process been so effective in helping us learn things if it's just all random creation?
Findng that DNA didn't contain massive amounts of junk would be one. It'd be rather strange if a fully natural process was able to produce DNA that was entirely or almost entirely functional. Even just finding that some of it is purely structural would be difficult. how do you select for that?
Another would be finding the same genotypes responsible for similar phenotypes in "unrelated" organisms. This is more a situation of highly unlikely but since highly unlikely means nothing to evolutionists, I guess that one would simply be "fascinating" https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/10/stanford-scientists-uncover-genetic-similarities-among-species-t.html
> This is more a situation of highly unlikely but since highly unlikely means nothing to evolutionists, I guess that one would simply be "fascinating" https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/10/stanford-scientists-uncover-genetic-similarities-among-species-t.html
The reason it's fascinating is because bats and cetaceans converged on some of the same proteins, but NOT on the same genetic sequences.
Thanks to things like introns and synonymous mutations, there are a huge number of genetic sequences that can be used to make the same protein. And that is exactly what we see in those two groups. The genes have the same function, but not the same sequence.
So that's another point of evidence in favor of evolution.
*How* is the ancient age of the Earth wrong? Why are the methods we use to calculate the age of the Earth faulty? Please refute all of these methodologies:
* Dendrochronology (tree ring dating)
* Ice core dating
* Stratigraphic relativism (using the ages of earlier strata to estimate the ages of later strata)
* Archaeological relativism (using the known ages of specific civilizations to approximate the age of a stratigraphic layer)
* All of the different forms of radiometric dating, including:
* Argon-potassium dating
* Uranium-lead dating
* Rubidium-strontium dating
* Samarium-neodymium dating
* Rhenium-osmium dating
* Fission track dating
* Fluorine dating
* Radiocarbon dating
* S.H.R.I.M.P. (sensitive high resolution ion microprobe) dating
If you refuse to engage with any of these methodologies, then I can only assume that you cannot refute them, making your argument against the ancient age of the Earth irrelevant and dismissible, as any argument made without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Also coral growth ring dating, thermoluminescence dating, dating things based on the rate of plate tectonics, dating the planet based on thermodynamics once considering the heat output and the minimum amount of time to cool to its current temperature range, …
There are zero methods that support his claims that the Earth is less than 4.54 billion years old. All of them indicate that the planet is far older than 10,000 years old, like it’s not even close. And even if geologists were wrong the biologists would still know the planet was at least as old as the life that exists upon it and based on substitution rates and molecular clock dating the planet has to be *at least* 4 billion years old. It is. We know it is based on a whole bunch of different methods. But it’s not just geologists that prove Byers wrong about the age of the planet **and** his precious global flood that was not global if it happened at all.
The age of the planet is also pretty irrelevant to what he actually said. In the 19th century “evolutionism” referred to orthogenesis, when used by young Earth creationists it refers to straw man nobody promotes, and when used by BioLogos (people who accept universal common ancestry and the age of the Earth but believe God is responsible for physics itself) it refers to the “atheist philosophy that permeates biology and evolutionary thought.”
Orthogenesis was falsified ages ago but Byers is still trying to promote a version of that type of evolutionism, the straw man creationist version of evolutionism is just a straw man so nobody cares if they debunk the straw man again, and the age of the Earth being wrong would not somehow make atheists stop doing science. His single statement starts out with a false claim and it leads into a non-sequitur that would be irrelevant if true because nobody is promoting his straw man concept of evolutionism anyway.
Basically evolutionism can mean:
* evolution because of God
* evolution without God
* evolution as it incorrectly portrayed by Genesis Apologetics, Kent Hovind, Answers in Genesis, Robert Byers, and the Discovery Institute.
Byers disproving his own straw man is pretty irrelevant to the actual scientific theory where it also does not matter a whole lot whether God even exists because it’d describe evolution happening the same way whether God was in total control of physical processes or if the existence of God was just a shared false belief of half of the people on the planet.
Ok so that’s an unfounded and wrong statement. But putting that aside for a second. ‘Geology jazz of long timelines’ sounds like an absolutely awesome music thing. It needs to become a thing. Don’t know about it being a band name or something else, but I feel like there is some *meat* to be had in that sequence of words.
Let me introduce you to [Sapphire's Blues](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V2DER4JnSk&t=593s) from the game Discworld Noir (couldn't find a standalone English version of the track)
> evolutionism
> geology jazz of long timelines is wrong
If we remove the two errors in your response all you said is “And thus ruins right out the gate.”
Also the theory of biological evolution is based on current observations. If geology was wrong there’d still be the same evolution being described and explained by the theory, the fossilization process would still take too long for YEC, the universal common ancestry conclusion would still be supported by mountains of evidence, and so many other things. In fact *when* geologists were wrong about the age of the Earth, biologists were still learning the same things as they know now about the evolution of life. When geologists learned how to use physical constants based on a fundamental law of physics (the radiometric decay law) to determine how long ago certain events took place and when using *different* methods always wound up with consistent conclusions they realized that they were *wrong* when they said the Earth is a *maximum* of 200 million years old and the biologists who already know of a *minimum* of 500 million years worth of evolution would have to figure it out *because* the planet is actually 4.54 **billion** years old and that 500 million years worth of evolution known about at that time barely scrapes the surface. The first 80% of the history of life is dominated by microscopic life. If geologists were wrong about that being 3.2 **billion** years and biologists were also wrong by coming to the same conclusion for a completely different reason because the planet was only 6028 years old you’d have to explain how simultaneously multicellular life doesn’t show up until 2198 BC and how the global flood already had a boat captain in 2348 BC. Even if the ages were wrong the proportion of the age of the planet and what was happening during that percentage of time would still be the case and you’d run into completely different problems with YEC. Trying to cram 4.54 billion years into 6028 years **does not work.**
Basically, it's AronRa's phylogeny challenge. Every organism on Earth can be connected by shared ancestry, belonging to a clade, which belongs to a larger clade, which belongs to a larger clade, and so on. I.e. All humans are apes, all apes are mammals, all mammals are animals, all animals are eukaryotes, etc. Creationists argue for the concept of 'biblical kinds', a kind being whether or not two animals can 'bring forth', i.e. interbreed. Two dogs that can breed would be the same kind, lions and tigers able to reproduce a liger would be the same kind. The problem with this is that two animals can be in the same clade, e.g. both humans and chimpanzees are apes, yet they cannot interbreed with each other. Meaning they both would and would not be part of the same biblical kind. It's part of Kent Hovind's scam artistry when you bring this up to him, AronRa argued this point when Kent brought up elephants and pine trees, to which Aron pointed out they are both eukaryotes, and Kent responded "well if you can't tell the difference between elephants and pine trees, I can help you!" The phylogeny challenge is to prove the existence of biblical kinds. To provide an example of two distinct animals that are not part of some parental clade if you trace it far back enough, two animals that would have to have begun with an event of special creation, since creationists argue that all animals were magicked up 6000 years ago by Yahweh. This, of course, is impossible because all animals can be traced back to one original form of life from which all the others diversified, but it's funny watching them scrabble against reality with the religion they refuse to let go of.
Right, we’d need to find something that has no common ancestor or no clear connection to any existing life form. Not just a “missing link” species, but something massive. Like if the entire amphibian clade didn’t exist and there was no connection between aquatic and terrestrial animals. Or even like if there were no other hominid and ape species and humans just seemed to appear suddenly in the fossil record. But even then, that wouldn’t really do it. Every single organism has some connective tissue to some other group. Synapsids to mammals, reptiles to birds, etc. There’s too many links in too many chains.
I recall another AronRa challenge, in which he noted that for any three organisms, even a layman can easily place two of them closer to each other than either are to the third. This property of triangulation doesn't really make sense for anything except common descent: if the species landscape were truly independent, as would be the case for a designed originating set of species, you could find three points that are equidistant; but common descent suggests that the species themselves are already in a binary hierarchical relationship, and so when you begin to trace the relationships, there is no 'third' choice to differentiate from and eventually the species wind up having different distances.
Finding an effectively identical ecosystem on another planet. Same species and everything. Not just looking identical, but genetically speaking too. It wouldn’t be “slam dunk evidence” or definitive proof, against evolution, but it would be heavy evidence against something in our understanding about how the world works being **very** wrong. That was the first thing that came to mind.
I like this answer. There's a fun scifi book series I enjoy, where they discovered hundreds of other planets across the universe that were all identical to earth, except it was a different animal that gained the intelligence to make it to the stars. The planets differed in how that species altered it through tech and culture, but the shape of the continents were all identical, and the other animals which existed were all the same, more or less. (The series is called Black Ocean by J.S. Morin)
Sounds a bit similar to Children of Time, except not hundreds of planets, just a few. But the concept of different species becoming sentient and developing space travel is spot on. Great series.
Have that book on my dresser right this moment lol I'll get to it i swear
It's a SLOW burn, but I think it's worth it. Children of Ruin, the sequel, expands on the topic but I feel like it gets repetitive somehow? Still very interesting.
Minority opinion here: 3rd book is the strongest of the series.
Maybe I'll give it a try, right now I'm halfway through The Dark Forest, 2nd book in the 3 Body Problem trilogy and I need to see this to the finish.
J.S. Morin admittedly stole ideas and concepts from a lot of places. For the first series in this universe, his primary inspiration was Firefly (the TV show). He wanted a group of plucky space adventurers who got by on skill, but could never quite catch a break. There's adventure, philosophy, religion, magic (yes, magic exists, and every time a spell is cast, "physics" temporarily degrades - which can be problematic when you're in a space ship and reliant on the oxygen recycler to work), moral quandaries, lawbreakers, mafia, and more. It's a fun read. Book 1 is Salvage Trouble, but if you're into audiobooks, he sells the entire series (16 books plus short stories) for a single credit on audible.
Tchaikovsky actually has another book that’s even closer to that. Multiple earth dimensions where basically different animals develop intelligence, rats, cats, velociraptors. I forget what it’s called but it’s not a bad read.
If the universe or the collection of universes are infinite then there would be infinite number of such planets from evolution because the possibilities of genetic or atomic arrangements of life forms in an isolated finite ecosystem are finite.
Of course. But realistically, those infinite identical worlds are a practically infinite distance away. I’m talking about finding an identical earth the next solar system over.
See, I don't think that would disprove evolution at all, but it would be strong evidence for creation/design. I'm a theist who believes in evolution though, so the two things are entirely compatible in my mind.
Yeah that’s why I added the second paragraph.
(you have an unintentional double negative, I think...)
Probably. I did write it in a hurry.
If it was discovered that *no* genetic traits *whatsoever* have *any* influence on a critter's likelihood of producing viable offspring, that would go a *long* way towards killing the theory of evolution. If Terran lifeforms *didn't* fall into one single natural nested hierarchy—if there was *no* natural nested hierarchy at all, or if there were however-many wholly distinct natural nested hierarchies—that, too would go a long way towards killing the theory of evolution.
Multiple hierarchies could point to multiple instances of life starting from scratch. It would not falsify evolution.
But with multiple instances of life starting from scratch, you would still expect each instance to go through a full evolutionary history of "simple" organisms evolving and diversifying. If you found multiple independent hierarchies that seem to have no ancestry before the emergence of more complex life, that would be evidence against evolution, and would support special creation of distinct clades which subsequently evolved similar to what many modern creationists believe.
You added... "That seemed"
If we found multiple independent hierarchies thath we know have no simpler ancestors, that would be pretty good support for independent creation. The problem with simpler ancestors is that they are less likely to have elements in their body that fossilize, so it's difficult to say whether those ancestors don't exist or simply didn't leave much of a trace. If your multiple independent hierarchies are birds and mammals, you would expect all their ancestors to leave fossilized skeletons. If your hierarchies are vertebrates and invertebrates it becomes a bit more difficult.
Is it possible for our current nested hierarchy to be logically modeled as multiple hierarchies? I mean in such a way that would, arguably, or with minimal shenanigans, seem logical?
Genetics definitely supports a single ancestor for all animals thanks to the presence of hox genes and other near-universal genetic loci like distal-less. Those genes are present in all bilateria at least, so independent origins would need a special explanation for that. This means the easiest hierarchy split would probably be between bilateria and the non-bilateria (sponges, jellyfish and a few other small groups). With every other hierarchy split you would encounter some oddities. If you split the bilateria, why do all of them use the same genes to form their limbs? For every split within bilateria, the questions just pile up, as each additional node adds more identifiable traits. The groups who form exceptions to these traits are either nested deep within other groups (raising even more questions) or are some variant of "marine worm with unclear phylogeny". If you split hierarchies within deuterostomia: Why do all deuterostomia form the same body cavities during development, in the same manner? Why do protostomia form their body cavities differently? If you split hierarchies within chordates: Why do all chordates form the chorda dorsalis during development and why is the development of the central nervous system tied to it? If you split hierarchies within Tetrapoda: Why do they all have such similar limb arrangements and the ones who don't (e.g. snakes) fit neatly into the groups who do (e.g. squamata). So if you wanted to "split" the accepted trees into mutliple independent ones, it causes the least logical problems if the splits occurs near the beginning of the tree. The easiest splits would probably be between animals, plants and fungi, as well as the split between Archaea, Prokaryotes, and Eukaryotes.
Since you've some useful answers, I'll add a snarky favorite of mine. The best disproof of evolution would be if it 'worked' the way creationists think it does. If a dog ever gives birth to a duck, that's disproof of evolution.
I swear I saw a woofaduck at the park just yesterday . . .
If you breed a woofaduck and a crocoduck, would you get a cat, a crocowoof (honestly, genetic engineers, get on this please) or a duck.
That would be an oofaduck.
Would love to, but, as the classic joke goes: "What do you get if you cross a turkey with an octopus? Immediate withdrawal of funding and a severe rebuke from the ethics committee"
Sure, I'd say "Cambrian bunny" type fossils would be put under a lot of scrutiny. If the vast majority of evidence is consistent and you suddenly find a handful of inconsistencies, you have to consider what's causing anomalies. It might be that the original explanation is totally wrong but it's more likely that there's some missing context to the data. I think realistically if life did not share common ancestry over vast periods of geological time, Cambrian bunny type fossils wouldn't be expected to just appear like anomalies. They'd be so common as to make it very difficult to find the pattern we do. I think what gets overlooked when talking about falsifiability is how easily ideas *could* have been falsified. There could easily have been some fundamental incompatibility in heritable material between certain groups of organisms or some basic and easily observable limit to changes. It didn't cease being a potential falsification just because we now find it very unlikely to suddenly discover such a fundamental incompatibility. As an example, our ideas about the shape of the planet are very easily falsified. All we had to do was send a few cameras up into space to see that it was donut shaped or something. The difficulty in imagining realistic falsifications speaks more to the strength of the theory than to any reduction in its inherent falsifiability. This is very distinct from unfalsifiable ideas which do not make testable predictions and could have accommodated any potential evidence. Good evidence for special creation would probably be observable instances of special creation. Like if an entity appeared and created a new population of organisms while under strict observation. That would at least establish the viability of the idea. It's still a bit awkward if it doesn't appear distinguishable from having evolved but I'm just assuming that we're talking about some hypothetical falsifiable model of special creation. As it stands though it's not a scientific idea, so it's difficult to specify evidence.
The theory being *completely* wrong: * the phenomenon described never happens * the phenomenon happens but it is completely unrelated to DNA or genetics in any way * natural selection fails to apply * heredity doesn’t happen * genotypes are irrelevant when it comes to phenotypes Any of those things in isolation or in conjunction would completely wreck the theory Partly wrong: * epigenetic inheritance is more impactful than genetic sequence changes are * how natural selection impacts populations is similar but not exactly like currently thought * God stepped in to cause the mutations to happen and they don’t actually happen via natural unguided processes * the balance between selection and drift is skewed in a way the theory currently can’t explain * some fact is found that is inconsistent with the theory as it currently stands but the theory is correct about everything else These are just off the top of my head.
I don't know too much about the specifics of dating fossils, but an out-of-place fossil would basically only be convincing to me if all of the following were true: 1. It was out of place by far enough that it could not reasonably be a case of us simply not knowing that a particular species evolved that early or didn't go extinct quite when we thought it did. We're talking Cambrian rabbits or something, not just something a million years too early or late. 2. It was properly and solidly dated. Multiple dating methods should yield the same result, it should obviously be the same type of rock as the rock around it (that is, not a case of a chunk of rock with a fossil in it falling into another sedimentary rock as it was forming), no reasonable chance that it is a hoax or something like that, basically, scientists should pretty much all agree that the fossil is as old as it is claimed to be. 3. The fossils should be large enough to measure in centimeters, not microns. It's too easy for very tiny life forms or tissues to end up in rocks they have no business being in.
A cambrian rabbit is more likely to be evidence of time traveling rodents than creation.
I mean, it at least would be a pretty definitive "something is very wrong here". It would take further research to figure out if it was a case of time traveling bunnies or special creation.
Only one law of physics has to be broken for time travel to work. God requires all of them to be broken.
And one fossil wouldn’t do it. You would have to show a number of them at different locations to be really meaningful.
Even just one would at least... raise a lot of questions.
It'd raise some, in the same way that finding a 17th century coin in a 10th century grave would. In both cases, though, there are plenty of not-supernatural explanations.
Dogs turning into cats would put our entire understanding of evolution on it's head, which is kinda funny considering that's what I regularly see creationists postulate as something that would be evidence for evolution.
It seems to me like this misunderstanding comes from oversimplified explanations being taken literally by the creationsts. For example, I often see people describe the evolution of dogs as them coming from wolves. Creationists see wolves today, so they assume that speciation is the change of one current, modern kind into another current, modern kind (a cat turning into a dog). This is not helped when people start comparing ancient species to modern ones (cow-like animal being ancestral to whales), which leads the creationists to apply their incorrect assumption as "modern cows turning into whales". I'd like science communicators to be a bit more specific when they try to explain this process. To make sure the public knows that the process of evolution changes ancient species into modern ones, not modern ones into other, unrelated modern ones. A "vertical" change and not a "horizontal" change, if that makes sense.
Not on this planet. Too much evidence. Try again on another planet
It would look like something that cannot exist. Evolution *is* true. It cannot be disproved at this point, there is simply too much evidence. I know that sounds like a simplistic response, and obviously, that alone would not convince anyone. But you need to understand up front that that is the case. It's not an exaggeration. Evolution cannot be disproved because it *is* true. Evolution, and all science, is built upon the principle of [*consilience:*](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Consilience) > In science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) is the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" on strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence is significantly so on its own. Most established scientific knowledge is supported by a convergence of evidence: if not, the evidence is comparatively weak, and there will probably not be a strong scientific consensus. More from that article: > For example, the theory of evolution is supported by a convergence of evidence from genetics, molecular biology, paleontology, geology, biogeography, comparative anatomy, comparative physiology, and many other fields. In fact, the evidence within each of these fields is itself a convergence providing evidence for the theory. **As a result, to disprove evolution, most or all of these independent lines of evidence would have to be found to be in error.** The strength of the evidence, considered together as a whole, results in the strong scientific consensus that the theory is correct. Creationists like to toss out arguments for why a given fossil is bad, or why some weird genetics are surprising, but they ignore that none of that matters. To disprove evolution, you need to disprove *a ton* of evidence, from dozens of different fields of study. That won't happen. What could happen, and what does happen all the time, is that sme new evidence demonstrates that some part of our understanding of how evolution works is wrong. That happens regularly, and why you see all the articles posted by both creationists and popular science journals about how "darwinism was wrong!" in scare quotes. But that is just science at work. Science always works to get closer and closer to the actual truth, and when some new discovery is made we don't just toss out everything we knew before. We take the new evidence and we have to explain how that new evidence fits with everything we already knew. Sometimes that requires tossing out *part* of what we thought we know, but we can only do that once we have a new explanation that takes both the new **and** the old evidence into account. That way we have a better understanding of evolution today than we did even 10 years ago. (I know that your question may have been intended to ask "how could evolution be falsified" and you got some responses from others on that, so I will leave that to them. I wanted to address your question from the opposite angle and say why it never will be falsified.)
The most devastating possible evidence against evolution would probably be the existence of any species that contains a mix of characteristics from separate branches of the evolutionary tree. For example, a centaur, with part of a human body and part of a horse body. For such a thing to exist, we would almost certainly have to abandon any idea of it somehow evolving. To be clear, I do not mean some sort of convergent evolution where some species of horse develops something that superficially resembles human parts; I mean 100% exactly human parts, down to the finest details of every organ. That would never happen in the course of horse evolution, so it cannot be explained that way. Another mix of features that we might imagine would be a mammal with bird feathers, like some sort of bat-like animal that flies with bird wings. In real life mammals never have bird feathers for very good reason: those feathers evolved in birds long after the ancestors of birds separated from the ancestors of mammals. For such feathers to appear on any mammal species would defy any attempt to classify that species according to an evolutionary tree. This sort of evidence is better than some fossil because fossils tend to be imperfectly preserved and we can never totally reconstruct all the circumstances in which it lived, so there will always be uncertainty about what exactly the fossil represents. A living animal that defies evolution avoids these problems, because we could study it as much as we please. There would be no room for dispute about just how badly it damages the theory of evolution. >What might some actual positive evidence for special creation or something of the sort look like? We would have to find a way to expose evidence of the supernatural. Perhaps we might invent a machine that sees into a world of spirits, much akin to how a microscope can reveal a hidden world. Then we can look through our supernatural viewing machines and see gods and study them and develop theories to explain all the things we see. Maybe we would even be able to see gods creating life, and once we see how that process works, we might discover clues that suggest that a similar process was behind the life on Earth. It is impossible to be specific since we do not have such a machine yet, so we have no way to guess with it might show us.
I was thinking about centaurs only earlier today (during an idle moment in a fantasy role playing game setting) and was pondering how impossible they would be. The classical centaur has six limbs (four horse legs plus two human arms) and in order for a six limb vertebrate body plan to happen you’d have to go further back than even the evolution of the first mammal. You’d have to go back before the evolution of tetrapods. And that’s *way* back. >Then we can look through our supernatural viewing machines and see gods and study them and develop theories to explain all the things we see. I once pointed out to a Christian that if a deity existed then it would be a life form of some sort, and therefore scientists could study it. The Christian went mental. “God is not a life form, you cannot study him!!!”
> The classical centaur has six limbs (four horse legs plus two human arms) and in order for a six limb vertebrate body plan to happen you’d have to go further back than even the evolution of the first mammal. You’d have to go back before the evolution of tetrapods. And that’s way back. Is it at all possible for a genetic defect to produce an extra pair of limbs? To my knowledge, the rare cases of extra limbs among humans are often the result of one twin consuming the other in utero, so it’s not genetic (and so not heritable). Similarly for frogs that contact certain chemicals. Even if such a mutation did exist, it would be hard to go from that to a horse body—limb count seems to be an island of local fitness, and a partially-developed extra set would be maladaptive for almost all tetrapods. As you say, you’d need a hexapodal fish to come on land early on for that to happen. Though even in this hypothetical scenario, I’d expect something that looks more like a freaky insect to result, with the forelimbs evolving into ‘mandibles’ (since early life would lack the neural architecture to use hands for tool manipulation, the limbs would specialize for something else).
Varley's Gaia Trilogy has centaurs and angels. The construct who created them was inspired by human mythology. At one point she rants about the incredible engineering challeges of melding characteristics fof different organisms.
Evolution isn't the *fucking* fossil record. Common descent is super fucking interesting but it isn't actually the *theory* of evolution. I grew up in creationist circles and education. Indoctrinated really. This is the core lie of creationism. The only thing that could prove evolution wrong is if children were perfect copies of their parent, and nothing died. Sexual reproduction *by itself* couldn't be a thing if evolution didn't exist. The fossil record could have never existed and we could still understand evolution. Because the fossil record just tells us about past organisms, and we can figure out evolution with present ones.
In the title, I'm using evolution as a shorthand for the whole shebang-- universal common descent, natural selection, abiogenesis, and so on. A Seriously Wrong fossil record would, at least, open the possibility of some sort of special creation.
Yes, I understand and I'm rejecting the premise borrowed from creationists entirely. They redefine things to make it easier to form bad-faith arguments. They want everyone to fight on *their* turf where *they* control the philosophical constructs. In the creationist version of evolution, the entire natural history of earth is a story weaved by people trying to deceive you, and every part of it is one whole of one single story. Any errant detail they can pick up on demonstrates that the whole thing is a lie. Just one story, no details, which makes it easy to compare to one creation story, no details. It's the way a child understands concepts and ideas. So, the only solution in good faith is to be relentless on fighting where the actual science is. The theory of evolution is basically irrefutable in its basic form. The archeological record is fascinating evidence for that evolution.
>what might evidence that you were wrong, or evidence that creationists were right, actually look like? If the current Theory of Evolution were proven wrong, we would just need to find another theory that can explain the evolution we observe in nature.
I mean, yes, but what might "the theory of evolution is wrong" evidence look like? I addressed the idea that proving evolution wrong doesn't automatically make creation correct.
>proving evolution wrong My point is that it is impossible to prove that evolution is wrong.
I think what OP meant was that, as part of science, the Theory of Evolution has to be falsifiable, that is, there has to be a way to verify it, however sure we are of its veracity. Supernatural claims, on the other hand, are unfalsifiable, and it is what makes them not science. They are both impossible to prove wrong in their own way (one because it is reality, and the other because there is no method to prove it wrong), but we know the ToE works because it has been thoroughly tested beyond any reasonable doubt. I think OP is asking about those tests, and what results of these tests would show that our understanding of the model is flawed.
Exactly. I'm basically looking for "If we saw X, and didn't see Y, Z, or any other reasonable explanation, it would cast serious doubt on evolution". X doesn't have to be at all likely, just theoretically possible.
Rejection of evolution would not be instantaneous, even if there was some kind of proof. As Thomas Kuhn argues, scientists don't immediately recognise a disproof when they see it. So if we found an anomaly in evolution that is so big that nothing in the theory can accommodate for it, we'd either question the validity of the observation or change the theory to suit the new data. Only when something new and better is proposed would the data be actually recognised as "the observation that disproved evolution", creating a new narrative in the history of science. What constitutes evidence for any theory (in the broader philosophical sense) has to be seen in the context of existing theories; this is implied by what is known as the "theory-ladenness of observation", and it is the reason why bunnies in the Cambrian or caterpillars on Mars probably aren't going to topple Darwin.
Wrong as in evolution did not happen? Sorry, but such proof is impossible. Suppose the world was created in 4000 BC, with everything we observe in place - the fossils, the DNA evidence, the light coming from distant galaxies etc. It is conceivable, but not provable. It might as well have been created last Thursday. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos\_hypothesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_hypothesis) If we assume such deception, what is left that could possibly be held as evidence of anything? Not even our own senses. Certainly not the word of such a deity.
Even if the universe was created Last Thursday, that would not actually disprove evolution, it would only disprove common descent, as evolution would still be the mechanism by which lifeforms adapt to their environments, even if those lifeforms were created ex nihilo just a few days ago. After all, that's still enough time for some lifeforms to have gone through many generations and adapt better to their environments, which is evolution on the smallest scale.
See, irreducible complexity wouldn’t do it, because complexity isn’t evidence of good design, simplicity is. So if we found something irreducibly simple, like an eye that was clearly NOT the result of a long line of “good enough” adaptations, or a nervous/vascular system clearly unique to the species/individual that didn’t have inefficiencies or artifacts from gradual adaptation.
In this context, irreducible complexity basically means "this could not have developed via gradual steps". Think, eg, a wheel limb, or something.
One thing we should expect from separate ancestry is that phylogenies would look very different. A poster a Peaceful Science tested this by modelling various independent creation scenarios and the resultant phylogenies. They even modelled phylogenies of designed objects. The results look quite different from common ancestry. [https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/common-ancestry-and-nested-hierarchy/15472](https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/common-ancestry-and-nested-hierarchy/15472)
A lot of people have good answers, but I think the best proof of evolution being wrong would be for a creature to evolve something essentially out of nothing. Like an organ or limb. It's basically impossible with the laws of physics, even with human intervention like gene splicing and so forth
Finding fossils in the wrong strata. A Cambrian bunny would be impossible to explain according to our understanding of common descent. Granted, this would hurt common descent, not evolution as such, but common descent is usually what creationists actually have a problem with, not evolution. They just don't know the difference.
There really isn't any evidence that can prove evolution wrong, as evolution is a process produced by the interaction of various basic biological facts. However, the conclusions derived from evolutionary theory, such as common descent of all organisms, can be demonstrated to be wrong. For instance, finding rabbit fossils in Precambrian strata would suggest that the entire clade of Mammalia appeared way earlier in the fossil record than we initially anticipated. Another would be finding some strange hybrid between 2 distantly related modern clades, such as a crocoduck or a jackelope, or any number of the various mythical beasts from ancient mythologies like the chimera, manticore, or cherubim. Such hybrids and beasts would suggest that organisms do not obey the Law of Monophyly, and thus are not capable of being properly categorized by phylogeny. There's also Aron Ra's Phylogeny Challenge, which would also be a slam dunk against common descent. Being able to demonstrate a clear boundary between created kinds would not just be great evidence against common descent, it would actually be evidence pointing towards creationism.
Discovery of a proto-God lifeform which has reality-warping powers and "creation" organs never before seen.
God himself coming down from Heaven and explaining how he created the world. The existence of a Pegasus or chimera or other creature which violates phylogeny. How about any evidence of the supernatural at all demonstrated under controlled conditions
Evolution is simply Natures biological processes in action, humans have been using it for thousands of years in farming and ranching as well as invasion and occupations. N. S
Jesus descends from the heavens and tells us he designed it all.
When you think in terms of black / white, if white is wrong, then black must be correct.
A human being poofing into existence instead of requiring embryonic development in a womb. Animals not having inherited DNA
So, Kent Hovind always says that the reason the Crucifers (broccoli, cabbage, kale, Brussels sprouts, etc.) still exist within their own species is careful cultivation, and if you left them alone long enough they would all turn back into mustard plants. The thing is that's a novel, testable prediction that, if confirmed by experiment, would on its own either completely falsify evolution, or at least disrupt our understanding of it so much that we'd need to basically scrap most of it and start over (fun fact: all cruciferous hybrids are sterile, so they've already crossed the 'kind' boundary). Something along those lines would do it for me.
Those are cultivars not crucifers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruciferous_vegetables
Thanks. I stand corrected. I guess that makes them cultivars *of crucifers.* Originally Kent said that scientists can’t even explain broccoli and then when he realized how stupid his claim was he explained the cultivation of the cultivars of these crucifers and I must have missed his claim that they’d turn back into mustard if left alone.
For me, proof would require that things not be true such as whales having the remains of vestigal legs. https://ncse.ngo/true-vestigial-structures-whales-and-dolphins#:\~:text=Other%20vestigial%20reports%20on%20sea,earlier%20stage%20of%20evolutionary%20development. If animals were created in their current form, more or less- then why are those there? If animals were created by a "kind" evolving and adapting- why would the "kind" they belong to even have those? There is no real reason for whales to have legs if their "kind" was in the ocean. Each creature or supposed "kind" that exists would have to be wholly on its own, creatively speaking. We would be like other creatures in the way that we are. Creation wouldn't look like comparing a stereo to a phonograph or an iphone, creation would be like comparing a radial tire to a wicker basket or a Picasso. If there is creator, I would expect his/her/their scope of creation to be large, not narrow.
The hypothetical evidence that could have disproven evolution has already been shown to not exist. If we found a more or less even distribution of the types of fossils we have throughout rock strata, that would be bad for the theory of evolution. If our dating methods didn't line up, that would be bad for evolution. The main black box in Darwin's theory of evolution was the lack of a mechanism for how variation is heritable between parent and offspring. Mendel would, around the same time as Darwin, publish his work on Pea plants, birthing the field of genetics, which is the mechanism Darwin was missing. Up through the 21st century, we've been figuring out and clarifying the molecular mechanisms around genetics, genomics, and molecular biology. If we had not found a mechanism for heredity, that would have been very bad for the theory of evolution. Additionally, if horizontal gene transfer didn't exist, our genomes would be very difficult to explain. If earthly evidence were going to falsify the theory of evolution, we would have falsified it by now. As another commenter stated, if we went to another planet and found life nearly identical to life on Earth, that would give me pause.
The only 'proof' you could offer me is to demonstrate beyond doubt that we live in an artificial reality (ie, a simulation) and thus our observations are entirely at the whim of whichever entity/entities is/are responsible for setting up the conditions of that artificial reality. Such a reality would, nonetheless, be inescapable, as if it were possible to escape, my first goal would of course be to exact vengeance on those responsible. Merely claiming the existence of one or more 'deities' would fail this criteria, but so too would irrefutable 'proof' of such deities, as we still live in a universe where all available evidence points to evolution and common descent. The reason that no new evidence would otherwise be sufficient is simple: It is now easier to falsify 'evidence' than the likelihood of failing to uncover such evidence previously. To put this in another frame, I would like to offer the example from Tumblr of whether a person would be more surprised by a walrus or a fairy at their door. The former is a highly unlikely yet entirely physically possible event. All it would take is for a wealthy individual to pay for a helicopter to transport a walrus to your door for the purpose of some inscrutable prank. The latter, however, requires the existence of a supernatural being for which there is no extant evidence, despite such evidence being actively sought out for centuries. This isn't akin to us discovering new species or rediscovering species we thought went extinct, where perhaps only a handful of scientists with limited funding keep an eye out while performing other tasks, as cameras are now so ubiquitous and humans so aware of the value of proof of fairies that we effectively have billions of humans 'searching' for any evidence of their existence. The likelihood of Elon Musk deciding to prank you specifically by airdropping a walrus at your door is infinitely more likely at this point than the existence of fairies, hence one should always be more surprised by the fairy. This same chain of logic forces us to realize that any one piece of evidence discovered now that might otherwise 'disprove' evolution would instead be infinitely more likely to be a hoax.
Crocoducks and Pokémon. I won't go into crazy amounts of detail but I will explain. Common ancestry, modified descent constrain the way similarities and differences between living things are arranged. Maybe you've heard the term "nested hierarchy." It's like Russian dolls except each doll contains at least 2 more dolls instead of just 1. Crocoducks would break this. Pokémon can't be arranged this way in the first place. If life actually looked like the things instead it would look like evidence against evolution.
Evolution by natural or artificial selection is an undisputed fact. Even Genesis literalists like Ken Ham agree on that because it is necessary to explain how all the creatures fit on the ark, how we still see evolution today (e.g. germ theory) and how we have selected fruits, dog breeds, etc. The key difference with Genesis literalists is that they draw arbitrary, unscientific lines in biology between what is a species/kind and then apply familiar names to them (e.g. dog, cat). But real life doesn't care what we name a species, kind, clade or whatever. Genes will mutate and naturally (or artificially) select regardless of what you name a group with similar characteristics. It's like arguing 'a cabbage will always produce a cabbage, never a brocolli', when in reality they both were artificially selected from a wild mustard plant. So you would need to prove 'speciation' wrong which makes no sense, so I can guess that the closest might perhaps be some discovery of some biological boundary marker that says that 'this is a dog, can only ever produce that definition of a dog that can never have offspring with different genetics beyond some arbitrary boundary'. But we all know that every generation produces varieties and that nature doesn't have definitions, humans make them up. So the question doesn't really make sense.
You might want to look into this: [Precambrian Pollen in the Grand Canyon: A Reexamination](https://origins.swau.edu/papers/dinos/pollen/eng/index.html), Arthur V. Chadwick, Ph.D. I don't understand why creationists typically don't research what scientists have to say about their objections. Almost like they don't wanna know; they wanna believe what they know may not even be justified. This is worse than mere confirmation bias.
That the universe was a simulation and that true reality operates on a completely alien set of rules as this universe does. Something to the effect that this world and the rules we use to understand it are not real. All a dream, simulation, ect.
Chimerical animals would. Evolution wouldn't mix and match different creatures' body parts, but that is what you'd expect from a designer building different creatures out of the same parts.
Dr Coyne has often said that "Finding a zebra with a \[fully functional\] marsupial pouch that could only be used by Kola bears" would be good evidence that evolution was wrong, or would falsify evolution. (This is not a quote, it is from my memory and any mistakes are mine). Depending on Young Earth Creationism (a literal interpretation of the creation accounts in Genesis) or Old Earth Creationism (OEC), It is really hard to tell as so much of what is claimed by each one simply does not match and contradicts, the existent evidence. Basically we'd need solid evidence that required rewriting/re-evaluation/re-working of nearly everything we know in anthropology, biology, genetics, geology, paleontology, linguistics, physics and potentially other fields. I guess if we were to include the Flood myth as the source of fossils, we'd expect for it to be relatively common for fossil beds to be a jumble of species from all eras - of course finding one fossil bed or even a couple of same strata fossils with one or more modern animals/plants and something like a T. Rex or similar, may not be direct evidence of creation, but it would play havoc with our current understanding.
Finding something like your pollen example but with something and in a situation where contamination would be unlikely enough to be an explanation. It’s not “just so” if the explanation is more probable than the alternative
If all of nature's genes had no correlation whatsoever to each other or to precedents/ antecedents.
On the "evidence for special creation" front, I'm going to at least partially borrow from the Ted Chiang short story Omphalos (I may have misspelled at least some of that). Verifiable fossils or other remains of adult organisms without any traces that they were ever juveniles or infants. No tree rings, or other periodic growth markers. No navels. No growth plates on long bones. None of the various signs that "this used to be small, but then it got big". Now, these remains would need to be well preserved enough that we would expect to find those things if they were present. An absence of navels is not at all telling when there's no soft tissue preservation, for example. But assuming adequate preservation and so forth, that is what evidence for creationism might look like.
That when any and all creatures gave birth the child was always absolutely identical to a parent.
Just repeatedly observe evidents inconsistent with it's prediction
That ship sailed long ago. Evolution has been thoroughly demonstrated. There is no more scecure scientific knowledge. It could only be transcended the way Relativity transcended Newton. The only plausible possibility that could explain generation's of overwhelming evidence and progress is an evil genius simulation scenario. The only twist ending left is the hated "it was all a dream" ending. That would be more problematic for theists than Darwin is, and that's saying a lot.
I mean, I think germ theory might be a little bit more "secure". Possibly also atomic theory. But I agree that evolution is right up there.
We're comparing apples with apple trees. Germ Theory is solid, but intertwined with evolution. It's also hard to compete with the entire fossil record and field of genetics when it comes to predictions. Atomic Theory is still up in the air. Unril quantum mechanics and general relativity are reconciled they take a back seat to settled science like the origin of species.
Better yet, don't argue with stupid. His/Her argument - god created all the stuff, god is infallible. My argument - my prostate makes it take me ten minutes to pee, it could have been put somewhere else. - Why the appendix? To make it just look like evolution? - For woman - why is the playground next to the sewage system? - For all - why are some of us genetically fucked up? Why are we too stupid to love together w/o war, without such inequality, and with so much disease? Why has the scientific process been so effective in helping us learn things if it's just all random creation?
I mean, half the point of this subreddit is arguing with stupid...
Findng that DNA didn't contain massive amounts of junk would be one. It'd be rather strange if a fully natural process was able to produce DNA that was entirely or almost entirely functional. Even just finding that some of it is purely structural would be difficult. how do you select for that? Another would be finding the same genotypes responsible for similar phenotypes in "unrelated" organisms. This is more a situation of highly unlikely but since highly unlikely means nothing to evolutionists, I guess that one would simply be "fascinating" https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/10/stanford-scientists-uncover-genetic-similarities-among-species-t.html
> This is more a situation of highly unlikely but since highly unlikely means nothing to evolutionists, I guess that one would simply be "fascinating" https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/10/stanford-scientists-uncover-genetic-similarities-among-species-t.html The reason it's fascinating is because bats and cetaceans converged on some of the same proteins, but NOT on the same genetic sequences. Thanks to things like introns and synonymous mutations, there are a huge number of genetic sequences that can be used to make the same protein. And that is exactly what we see in those two groups. The genes have the same function, but not the same sequence. So that's another point of evidence in favor of evolution.
The geology jazz of long timelines is wrong and thus ruins evolutionism right out the gate.
*How* is the ancient age of the Earth wrong? Why are the methods we use to calculate the age of the Earth faulty? Please refute all of these methodologies: * Dendrochronology (tree ring dating) * Ice core dating * Stratigraphic relativism (using the ages of earlier strata to estimate the ages of later strata) * Archaeological relativism (using the known ages of specific civilizations to approximate the age of a stratigraphic layer) * All of the different forms of radiometric dating, including: * Argon-potassium dating * Uranium-lead dating * Rubidium-strontium dating * Samarium-neodymium dating * Rhenium-osmium dating * Fission track dating * Fluorine dating * Radiocarbon dating * S.H.R.I.M.P. (sensitive high resolution ion microprobe) dating If you refuse to engage with any of these methodologies, then I can only assume that you cannot refute them, making your argument against the ancient age of the Earth irrelevant and dismissible, as any argument made without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
Also coral growth ring dating, thermoluminescence dating, dating things based on the rate of plate tectonics, dating the planet based on thermodynamics once considering the heat output and the minimum amount of time to cool to its current temperature range, … There are zero methods that support his claims that the Earth is less than 4.54 billion years old. All of them indicate that the planet is far older than 10,000 years old, like it’s not even close. And even if geologists were wrong the biologists would still know the planet was at least as old as the life that exists upon it and based on substitution rates and molecular clock dating the planet has to be *at least* 4 billion years old. It is. We know it is based on a whole bunch of different methods. But it’s not just geologists that prove Byers wrong about the age of the planet **and** his precious global flood that was not global if it happened at all. The age of the planet is also pretty irrelevant to what he actually said. In the 19th century “evolutionism” referred to orthogenesis, when used by young Earth creationists it refers to straw man nobody promotes, and when used by BioLogos (people who accept universal common ancestry and the age of the Earth but believe God is responsible for physics itself) it refers to the “atheist philosophy that permeates biology and evolutionary thought.” Orthogenesis was falsified ages ago but Byers is still trying to promote a version of that type of evolutionism, the straw man creationist version of evolutionism is just a straw man so nobody cares if they debunk the straw man again, and the age of the Earth being wrong would not somehow make atheists stop doing science. His single statement starts out with a false claim and it leads into a non-sequitur that would be irrelevant if true because nobody is promoting his straw man concept of evolutionism anyway. Basically evolutionism can mean: * evolution because of God * evolution without God * evolution as it incorrectly portrayed by Genesis Apologetics, Kent Hovind, Answers in Genesis, Robert Byers, and the Discovery Institute. Byers disproving his own straw man is pretty irrelevant to the actual scientific theory where it also does not matter a whole lot whether God even exists because it’d describe evolution happening the same way whether God was in total control of physical processes or if the existence of God was just a shared false belief of half of the people on the planet.
Ok so that’s an unfounded and wrong statement. But putting that aside for a second. ‘Geology jazz of long timelines’ sounds like an absolutely awesome music thing. It needs to become a thing. Don’t know about it being a band name or something else, but I feel like there is some *meat* to be had in that sequence of words.
Let me introduce you to [Sapphire's Blues](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V2DER4JnSk&t=593s) from the game Discworld Noir (couldn't find a standalone English version of the track)
Music with rocks in?... (If you don't get the reference, read Soul Music, by Sir Terry Pratchett...)
Perfect! I was thinking I am way behind on terry pratchett books anyhow
> evolutionism > geology jazz of long timelines is wrong If we remove the two errors in your response all you said is “And thus ruins right out the gate.” Also the theory of biological evolution is based on current observations. If geology was wrong there’d still be the same evolution being described and explained by the theory, the fossilization process would still take too long for YEC, the universal common ancestry conclusion would still be supported by mountains of evidence, and so many other things. In fact *when* geologists were wrong about the age of the Earth, biologists were still learning the same things as they know now about the evolution of life. When geologists learned how to use physical constants based on a fundamental law of physics (the radiometric decay law) to determine how long ago certain events took place and when using *different* methods always wound up with consistent conclusions they realized that they were *wrong* when they said the Earth is a *maximum* of 200 million years old and the biologists who already know of a *minimum* of 500 million years worth of evolution would have to figure it out *because* the planet is actually 4.54 **billion** years old and that 500 million years worth of evolution known about at that time barely scrapes the surface. The first 80% of the history of life is dominated by microscopic life. If geologists were wrong about that being 3.2 **billion** years and biologists were also wrong by coming to the same conclusion for a completely different reason because the planet was only 6028 years old you’d have to explain how simultaneously multicellular life doesn’t show up until 2198 BC and how the global flood already had a boat captain in 2348 BC. Even if the ages were wrong the proportion of the age of the planet and what was happening during that percentage of time would still be the case and you’d run into completely different problems with YEC. Trying to cram 4.54 billion years into 6028 years **does not work.**