Model Release Form - Utah Valley University: Fill & Download for Free

There are LOTS of problems with creationism that creationists can’t explain away (although they certainly try!):First, here is my video on the topic I adapted for Quora:And here’s the text:Exhibit A: Taxonomy (part 1)First, let me define the two basic positions: Evolutionary theory is the idea that all life on Earth evolved from a simple common ancestor that formed billions of years ago. Through natural genetic mutations and environmental pressures determining which individuals survive, that ancestor gradually diversified into all existing species. Creationism, on the other hand, claims that the God of the Bible created all species as individual, original “kinds” over the course of a few days some 6,000 years ago.Now for a claim to be scientific, it doesn’t have to have ALL the answers, but it MUST make some testable predictions that could potentially prove the claim false. And the first question to ask is, “If this idea is true, what evidence should we expect to see?” So let’s compare the predictions between evolutionary theory and creationism.First, evolutionary theory predicts that if all today’s species evolved from a single original ancestor that split into different species again and again over billions of years, we should see greater similarity in physical characteristics between species that branched off relatively recently compared to those species that branched off farther back in time. But all species MUST be connected to all other species at some point on this evolutionary tree of life.Indeed, that is exactly what we see. All humans, for example, share with all other apes: a similar skeletal and dental structure, complex brain, full color vision, opposable thumbs, internal organ layout, lack of an external tail, diet, and a range of blood types and diseases. All apes share with all other primates: binocular vision, flattened faces, relatively large brains, an external penis, only two nipples on the chest, bipedal capability, collarbones, prehensile hands and feet with five fingers and five toes, fingernails and toenails, a fatal reaction to Australia’s funnel web spider venom (no other mammals have this vulnerability), and an inability to create their own vitamin C. All primates share with all other mammals: warm-bloodedness, body hair or fur, milk production, single lower jaw bone, and a four-chambered heart. All mammals share with all other vertebrates: an internal skeleton, spinal cord, central nervous system, skull, skin, paired limbs, and closed circulatory system. All vertebrates share with all other animals: a digestive system, the need to consume other life in order to survive, and almost all have the ability to reproduce sexually and control their own movement. All animals share with all other eukaryotes: cells with a membrane-bound nucleus, membrane-bound organelles, and rod-shaped chromosomes. Thus, humans are apes, primates, mammals, vertebrates, animals and eukaryotes. This interconnectedness absolutely must exist in order for evolutionary theory to be true, and so far EVERY species discovered fits into this taxonomic classification system. Ironically, it was a biblical creationist, Carolus Linneaus, who developed this system when he realized that all life shows this tree-like, nested hierarchy...although he couldn’t explain why such a structure exists.One consequence of this tree-like structure is that species can only inherit characteristics from their ancestral line. So if the ancestor of mammals diverged from the reptile line before birds did, characteristics that evolved exclusively in birds—such as feathered wings—could not be found in mammals. Thus, it would be impossible to find such creatures as winged horses, griffins, harpies or angels. Nor would it be possible to find unicorns, centaurs, mermaids, crocoducks or any other species possessing anatomical features from a different evolutionary line that diverged BEFORE those anatomical features developed. That simply cannot happen if evolution is true. And, in fact, there is no credible evidence that any of those species ever existed.So what would creationism predict? Well, an all-powerful God would, by definition, be able to create virtually ANY type of species he wanted, so he would not be limited to the constraints of the evolutionary tree of life. We would thus expect to see taxonomy break down rapidly beyond the species level, rather than show that every species is interconnected to all other life via a branching tree. And there would be no reason NOT to see centaurs, griffins, mermaids, crocoducks and other species that could only exist through special creation. Yet there is no evidence that any such mixed creatures have ever existed. EVERY SINGLE species fits into the structure of the evolutionary tree.Exhibit B: Transitional Fossils (part 2)Another prediction of evolutionary theory is the existence of transitional forms—that is, species possessing physical characteristics of both what they evolved from and what they evolved into. If all life evolved from a common ancestor, then transitional species would HAVE to exist for each fork in the evolutionary tree. They wouldn’t be easy to find, since a speciation event often occurs with just a very small population over a geologically short period of time, and fossilization is EXCEEDINGLY rare, but transitional species MUST exist.When Darwin published his seminal work, On the Origin of Species in 1859, he lamented the lack of any known transitional fossils…but he predicted they HAD to exist if evolution is true. Sure enough, two years later the first transitional fossil was discovered. Named Archaeopteryx, it was a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds. It possessed the bony tail, clawed fingers, toothed jaws and snout characteristic of theropod dinosaurs, as well as the wings, flight feathers, hollow bones and wishbone characteristic of birds. While likely not the direct ancestor of modern birds, Archaeopteryx is nevertheless a perfect example of a form transitioning from one type of species into another.Fossilization is an extremely rare process, since it requires rapid burial in sediment-filled water, creating an oxygen-free environment that preserves hard parts, like bones and teeth, long enough to gradually replace with minerals. This means that the great majority of fossils are marine organisms, and that more than 99% of species are never fossilized. And finding those relatively few fossils in the narrow window between being exposed and eroding away is even more rare. Yet despite those limitations, since Darwin’s time we have discovered many HUNDREDS of transitional fossil species, including those showing the transition of reptiles into mammals, reptiles into dinosaurs, dinosaurs into birds, land mammals into whales, and much more.Researchers have even been able to predict what previously UNDISCOVERED transitional species must have looked like and where they would have to be found in the fossil record. This is how Tiktaalik—a transitional form between lobe-finned fishes and four-legged land animals—was discovered. Researchers had already found the fossils of both lobe-finned fishes and the earliest four-legged land animals, which they then used to predict what a transitional form between them would look like, as well as where it would have lived and the age of the rock formations in which it would be located. They then went out and discovered Tiktaalik right where they had predicted.That’s also how the many transitional forms between early apes and modern humans were discovered. Darwin himself predicted that humans must have originated in Africa because of our similarities to chimpanzees and gorillas. Sure enough, paleontologists exploring Africa have since found numerous fossil species with physical characteristics between early apes and modern humans, all within the right range of dates…exactly what evolutionary theory predicted we should find. You couldn’t ask for better demonstrations of the predictive power of evolutionary theory than these examples.So what would creationism predict? Well if all species were created basically in their current form, there would be no need for the existence of transitional species AT ALL. In fact, their existence would make NO sense and it would be impossible to predict their existence. So the mere fact that transitional fossils exist is evidence AGAINST creationism.This problem is only emphasized when creationists themselves analyze the collection of human transitional fossils to determine which they believe are ape and which are human. Creationism would not predict the existence of human transitional fossils at all, but one thing it WOULD predict is that humans—being a special creation—should be easy to tell apart from all other species. And yet, when creationists evaluate the line of increasingly human-like fossils, they can’t even agree among themselves where the dividing line between human and non-human lie. What could be a better indicator that a species is transitional than that?Two of the few testable claims made by young-Earth creationism are that the universe and all life were created by God 6,000 years ago, and that the entire Earth was drowned in a worldwide flood 4,300 years ago. Apart from the species preserved on Noah’s ark, all animals drowned, many of which were subsequently fossilized. Therefore, creationism predicts that nearly all fossils must be the same age—4,300 years old—and they must be sorted primarily according to flood dynamics.Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, predicts that fossils should vary in age over a span of hundreds of millions of years, and they must be sorted by lineage according to the evolutionary tree. It would thus be completely impossible, for instance, to find human remains in the fossil record before mammals evolved, since humans are a type of mammal and mammals had to evolve before humans could evolve.So how do these predictions compare to the evidence? For starters, since fossils require rapid burial in sediment-filled water, of course many fossils are associated with flooding. But if the fossil record was created by a single, worldwide flood, fossils should be all jumbled together—perhaps sorted somewhat by buoyancy or a species’ ability to escape rising flood waters, as some creationists have predicted. So is that what we actually see? Not even close. As you descend through the fossil record, plants and animals generally become simpler and less diverse, and they are associated with ecosystems of other similarly simpler and less diverse species. Furthermore, those species found higher up in the fossil record more closely resemble currently living species found in the same area as the fossils, whereas those species found lower down in the fossil record are increasingly different. Almost all fossils in the lowest levels look NOTHING like anything alive today. That is EXACTLY what we would expect to find if all species evolved from a simple common ancestor. In fact, evolutionary theory can confidently predict that no one will EVER find naturally occurring fossils of birds, mammals, dinosaurs, reptiles or amphibians among the many fossils in the ancient Cambrian rocks, since none of those animals evolved until more than a hundred million years AFTER the Cambrian formed. Sure enough, no such fossils have ever been discovered there. Creationism can’t account for ANY of that, nor can it make any equally specific, detailed predictions because the fossil record is simply not sorted by flood dynamics.As for determining the age of fossils, there are currently well over 40 different radiometric dating methods in use. Using appropriate, uncontaminated samples, most of these techniques are accurate to within just a 2% margin of error. And the accuracy only increases by using multiple samples and multiple dating methods to verify the results. When these techniques are used to test the ages of fossil samples, the results reveal that life began approximately 3.9 billion years ago, multicellular life 900 million years ago, a wide variety of body types 540 million years ago, land plants 465 million years ago, land vertebrates 397 million years ago, reptiles 310 million years ago, dinosaurs 230 million years ago, mammals 200 million years ago, birds 150 million years ago, the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor 7 million years ago, and modern humans appeared 200,000 years ago. These results closely match the evolutionary tree and they make sense only in the context of evolution. They are clearly far older than the 4,300 year or even 6,000 year creationist timelines, and they make no sense if all life was specially created at the same time.Creationists often point to the wide variety of life appearing suddenly in the fossil record during the Cambrian period—the “Cambrian explosion,” as it’s called—as evidence that life suddenly appeared all at once, as the creationist model claims. But there are a few problems with this. First, more primitive life existed for BILLIONS of years before the Cambrian explosion began, but hard parts suitable for fossilization hadn’t evolved yet. Second, the Cambrian explosion took place over a period of 20 to 25 MILLION years. That’s quite rapid in evolutionary terms, but completely incompatible with the creationist claim of a mere 6,000-year-old Earth and a seven-day creation. Third, the species that appear in the Cambrian bear virtually no resemblance to any species living today. ALL of them are extinct. That too is incompatible with creationism, but it makes sense if most of them died out but some evolved dramatically over hundreds of millions of years into the species we see today.Creationists of course question the accuracy of radiometric dating. However, when multiple, different radiometric techniques are correctly applied to samples from the same geological layers, they all result in similar dates. Plus, there are many non-radiometric dating techniques that ALSO indicate a far more ancient Earth than creationists claim. The oldest living tree is over 5,000 years old, and matching its tree rings with older dead trees creates an unbroken line of tree growth going back almost 14,000 years. That alone contradicts the claim of a 6,000-year-old Earth, but it gets worse. Mitochondrial and chromosomal evidence shows that the most recent woman from whom all current women descended in an unbroken line lived somewhere between 99,000 and 234,000 years ago, and the man from whom all current men descended in an unbroken line lived somewhere between 120,000 and 581,000 years ago. They were each part of existing populations when they lived, and it’s virtually certain they never met. Antarctica has up to 800,000 layers of yearly snow deposits on its permanent ice sheets. Gypsum crystals form exceedingly slowly, and the largest gypsum megacrystals in Mexico could not have formed in less than one million years. The Green River basins in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah have up to 6 million layers of yearly sedimentation deposits. Limestone stalactites form at a rate of only 4" per thousand years, meaning the 60' plus stalactites we’ve discovered must be at least 180,000 years old, but the limestone caves in which they grew would have required tens of millions of years to form. The Americas and Africa are moving apart at a rate of a few inches per year, and both their current distance apart and the distribution of fossils found on both continents indicate they were last in contact 200 million years ago. Tidal friction slows the Earth’s rotation by two seconds per 100,000 years, which means that 380 million years ago the days should have been 22 hours long with 400 days in the year. Corals can be used to test this because they produce both daily and annual growth rings, which can be counted to determine how many days there were in a year for corals radiometrically dated at 380 million years old…and the answer is also 400-day years. So as you can see, we have multiple dating techniques that can be cross-checked to verify the accuracy of radiometric dating.Exhibit C: Noah’s Flood (part 3)The list of evidence for an ancient Earth goes on and on, and NONE of it is consistent with only a 6,000 year old history, nor does it provide ANY support for a worldwide flood 4,300 years ago. But it gets worse when we look at the specific details of the Noah’s flood claim. Just SOME of the more serious problems include:• A handful of people somehow used bronze-age tools to build a large wooden ship in which to cram potentially MILLIONS of animals, along with their many specific dietary and other requirements for an entire YEAR. That much cargo would have sunk the ship immediately. Not only that, but even with today’s advanced tools and engineering it would be impossible to build such a large wooden ship without it immediately breaking apart in rough flood waters.• Most animals would have had to travel IMMENSE distances to get to the ark, including many like termites, snails, sloths, koalas and penguins that have limited mobility, or that can only tolerate a narrow range of environmental conditions, or that have highly specialized diets.• Supposedly there was a single, 18" window in the ark, which would have been entirely inadequate to provide ventilation, resulting in the quick suffocation of all the animals.• ALL the many diseases and parasites specific to each species would have had to be carried by at least one of each animal. Tens of thousands of diseases affect humans alone. I wonder which of Noah’s family members carried all the venereal diseases exclusive to humans....• For nearly all existing fossils to have been created by the flood, right before the rain started falling there had to have been an average of over 2,000 vertebrate species—ranging in size from tiny shrews to massive dinosaurs—for EVERY ACRE of land on the planet. That’s not even counting the more than 90% of species that are invertebrates.• If the rain came from a vapor canopy, it would have had to be superheated. If it came from ice falling from orbit, it would have become superheated upon entering the atmosphere. Add to that the water coming from the “fountains of the deep,” as the Bible describes it, which from even just a mile down would be boiling hot, and there’s easily enough heat to have vaporized the oceans and destroyed virtually all life on Earth.• The seismic activity pulling the continents apart, forcing up mountain ranges, and causing nearly all the world’s volcanoes to erupt at the same time would have poisoned the atmosphere, generated enough heat to vaporize the oceans, and once again destroyed virtually all life on Earth.• The amount of sedimentation that would need to have been mixed into the water to account for all the sedimentary layers being laid down at once would kill virtually all marine life. And most of the remaining life would have died from the radical changes in water salinity.• After the flood, the water covering the entire Earth’s surface would have had to go somewhere, but there is no mechanism for getting rid of anywhere near that much water.• After spending a year in cramped quarters without exercise, the animals would have had to travel up to many thousands of miles across often inhospitable terrain and vast oceans to reach their natural habitats. This includes all the animals that move extremely slowly or can only survive in limited environments.• Almost no land plants or their seeds can survive immersion in water for a year, so after the flood the land would have been barren, providing no food or habitats for the newly released animals.• And just eight stone-age humans would have had to repopulate their former lands across the world, reviving all the lost languages, writing, religions, professions, technologies and other unique societal developments of their former cultures, without showing any interruptions in their historical records, nor mentioning anything about a global flood AT ALL. And those eight people would have had to reproduce so incredibly rapidly that in just 150 years (fewer than eight generations) they would have had enough people to build Stonehenge, the pyramids and numerous cities mentioned in the Bible, as well as populate all of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, and the Americas with MILLIONS of people. All this while experiencing war, disease and global famine during a migration across the entire planet. Even using a global growth rate TWICE as fast as the most rapid ever recorded in human history, there would be fewer than 5,000 people in the entire world in those 150 years, which is nowhere near the MILLIONS of people required to match even the most conservative historical estimates.The realization that the ark described in the Bible would be orders of magnitude too small to fit millions of species and their supplies—even if only young, small specimens were brought on board—has caused many creationists to conclude that new species can evolve after all...at least up to a point. They define the biblical “kind” at the genus or even family level in an attempt to bring the number of species on board the ark from millions down into the thousands. The idea is that there was a single cat kind, a single antelope kind, a single beetle kind, a single two-legged carnivorous dinosaur kind, and so on, and that AFTER leaving the ark they all rapidly evolved into multiple species to account for the tens of millions of species seen both in the fossil record and alive today.But for that to work, all the surviving animals would need to have evolved at a MASSIVELY accelerated rate right after the flood. Just to give one example, the basic “cat kind” would have had to evolve into lions, tigers, leopards, snow leopards, cheetahs, caracals, mountain lions, wildcats, lynxes, bobcats, jaguars, jaguarundis, ocelots, servals, saber-toothed cats, domestic cats, and the rest of the 13 cat genera, 40 cat species and hundreds of subspecies...and do it quickly enough to show up as mummified remains, artwork and written historical records all within a few hundred years of the flood. Ironically, that pace of evolution is FAR faster than evolutionary theory predicts.Not only that, but before splitting into multiple species, each “kind” would have first had to breed up to thousands of groups to then send to all their new environments, some of which were many thousands of miles away. Only THEN could they have evolved into the tens of millions of species that exist today and in the fossil record. And all this supercharged evolution would have had to happen within a few hundred years...only to then abruptly slow WAY down to the pace we see today. So why isn’t there any historical or other evidence of tens of millions of animal groups suddenly appearing, migrating all over the globe, and then temporarily evolving at an incredible rate into a huge variety of new species? Clearly there are some serious problems with this “limited evolution” creationism.But other creationists insist that life cannot evolve beyond the species level—despite the problem of trying to fit many millions of animals onto Noah’s ark. They also claim that there have been no observed instances of species evolving into other species. The primary definition of a species is a population capable of producing fertile offspring, and once you have a genetically isolated population, all it takes is time and continued selective pressure to result in a whole new branch on the evolutionary tree. So do we have any examples of new, successfully breeding populations that can no longer breed with their original populations?Well, evolution is generally a slow process, taking an average of a million years and thousands of generations of environmental pressure to create a new species that PERSISTS. Nevertheless, we do have some good examples of observed evolution. Humans have actually participated in the process over many thousands of years through what is known as artificial selection. It’s the same process as natural selection, only with humans rather than natural environmental pressures determining which traits will survive and spread throughout a population. We’ve bred dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, turkeys, pigeons, etc. that are genetically distinct from their wild ancestors. We’ve taken advantage of unique mutations and cross breeding to evolve a species of grass into corn, a tiny wild fruit into large tomatoes, a seed-filled green fruit into long yellow bananas, and so on. We evolved a single wild plant into domestic cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi. In the lab, researchers have used controlled environments to put intense selective pressure on bacteria and fruit flies, causing them to speciate rapidly. A single species of bacteria can be made to evolve into multiple distinct species within a few hundred generations, and fruit flies can evolve into a new species within just 25 generations.But what about observed speciation in the wild? While the process of studying the evolution of new species in nature is of course more difficult than with artificial selection, there are still many observed instances of populations undergoing speciation. For example, European mice introduced to volcanic islands west of Gibraltar in 1419 evolved into six genetically distinct populations over the course of 500 years. Three species of wildflower that were imported to the US from Europe just 100 years ago evolved into two species of American goatsbeards. Nylon, which was invented in 1935, is a substance so artificial that nothing was able to consume it, but within 40 years a new species of bacteria was discovered that had acquired a mutation allowing it to digest nylon. And in 1981, researchers observed the breeding of two different finch species in the Galápagos Islands, which resulted in a new hybrid species that remains a successful breeding population today. So clearly both the artificial and natural observed evidence doesn’t support those creationists who claim new species cannot evolve.Exhibit D: Genetics (part 4)Another major prediction made by evolutionary science was that ALL species would be found to be constructed using the same fundamental architecture, which can be modified in some way through natural means and then inherited by the next generation. Although the all-powerful God of creationism COULD have used just one architecture, he could have just as easily employed a wide variety of unrelated construction systems—especially considering that humans are supposed to be a special creation different from animals. But then came the discovery that ALL life on Earth is based on nucleotides, almost exclusively in the form of DNA. Furthermore, we learned that DNA frequently acquires mutations that cause inheritable changes. Every person, for example, acquires around 60 new mutations. So evolutionary theory predicted the existence of DNA and mutations, something creationism could NOT have predicted.To counter this discovery, creationists have claimed that a simple common ancestor could never evolve into all the complex life we see today because, according to them, DNA can only lose information, never gain it, and mutations are always harmful. Therefore, their prediction was that there would exist no mechanism for creating new and beneficial genetic information. But then came the discovery that long DNA sequences, called “transposons,” frequently move around from one part of the genome to another, often duplicating themselves in the process and thus creating additional genes, which mutation can then turn into new information. Entire chromosomes can also double spontaneously, and mutations alone can add or subtract information. Furthermore, we discovered that the vast majority of mutations are neutral, with only a small percentage being harmful and a small percentage being beneficial. Even just a tiny percentage of beneficial mutations is all natural selection needs in order to cause evolution to occur.But that’s not all evolutionary theory predicts when it comes to DNA. If all life is genetically related, then species that are closer to humans on the evolutionary tree based on physical characteristics should also share a higher percentage of DNA compared with species that are less similar. Sure enough, we now know that humans share approximately 99.5% of genes with other humans, 98% of genes with chimpanzees, 93% with monkeys, 92% with mice, 90% with cats, 84% with dogs, 80% with cows, 60% with chickens, 44% with fruit flies, 26% with yeast, 18% with plants, and 7% with bacteria. Creationism couldn’t have predicted that we would share ANY genes with other species, much less that the percentage of shared genes would align with the evolutionary tree. Shared genes are a problem even for creationists who accept limited evolution, since it shows genetic connections BETWEEN biblical “kinds,” something they would never predict would exist. What they MIGHT predict is some mechanism that would stop genes from evolving species into a new “kind,” but there is no evidence that any such mechanism exists.Not only that, but in recent decades we’ve discovered that DNA mutates at a predictable rate, and we can use the differences in DNA between any two species to determine how long ago those two species diverged from a common ancestor. The results of this “molecular clock” closely match the evolutionary tree and the radiometric dating of the fossil record. Again, there is no way creationism could ever predict this, but it is EXACTLY what you would expect to see if evolution is true.However, when researchers discovered that chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have 24 pairs of chromosomes, while humans have only 23 pairs of chromosomes, creationists were excited to finally have a genetic discovery that didn’t fit the evolutionary model. It seemed to support their claim that we are not related to the great apes, so how could evolution account for this? Well, genetic researchers made the testable prediction that if evolution is true, somewhere in the human genome there would be evidence of two chromosomes becoming fused together. Chromosomes have a distinct structure in the middle called a centromere, as well as a cap at each end called a telomere. So a pair of chromosomes that had fused together at one end would have TWO centromeres and TWO telomeres embedded within it, as well as two end cap telomeres. Sure enough, researchers found that exact fused structure in one of the human chromosomes. Furthermore, they discovered that genes in the single fused human chromosome were a match for genes found split between the two unfused chimpanzee chromosomes. Once again the evolutionary prediction turned out to be true, while the creationist prediction failed.Another piece of evidence from DNA is the existence of pseudogenes, otherwise known as “dead genes.” These are genes that have become deactivated, usually because a species no longer needs them in order to survive and so they are no longer selected for. For example, all primates lack the ability to produce vitamin C. This likely occurred because there was plenty of vitamin C in our ancestral diet and thus the gene to construct it offered no survival advantage, which allowed it to accumulate damaging mutations. All primates still have the DNA sequence to make vitamin C, but it is missing a vital enzyme which has caused the gene to become inactive. Similarly, dolphins have genes for detecting odors in both water and air. However, since they are no longer land animals, they have little use for detecting odors in air, and now 80% of those genes have become deactivated. Also, only the most primitive mammals—the platypus and spiny anteater—lay eggs, but all other mammals contain dead genes for producing a yolk sac. Human embryos, for example, have a vestigial yolk sac that detaches in the second month of pregnancy and is reabsorbed by the body. If all species were original perfect creations, the existence of these dead genes from ancient ancestors would make no sense. Their existence is thus evidence AGAINST a perfect creator. Pseudogenes only make sense in the light of evolution where nature carries ancestral genetic baggage.Yet another piece of evidence from DNA comes from another type of dead genes called endogenous retroviruses (or ERVs). Retroviruses reproduce by inserting their DNA into the DNA of a host’s cells. On rare occasions they can leave dead genes in the host’s sex cells, which are then passed on to all future descendants of that host. Those dead genes act like an identifying bar code. So if two different species possess the same ERVs in the same locations of their genome, it indicates that the two species share a common ancestor that was infected prior to becoming two separate species. For example, the human genome contains more than half a dozen ERVs that are ALSO shared by chimpanzees, which only makes sense if we once shared a common ancestor. This is another example of nature carrying ancestral baggage that we would expect to see if evolution is true. Creationism, on the other hand, would predict that such connections should NOT exist, and it has no credible explanation for ERVs.Exhibit E: Intelligent Design (part 5)In an attempt to impart scientific legitimacy to creationism, creationists have come up with what they call “intelligent design.” The idea is that some biological features are too complex to have evolved from a simpler state, because if you remove any single component the feature no longer functions, and thus the feature must have been created fully formed by a creator. Creationists call this “irreducible complexity.”So what testable predictions does intelligent design make? Creationists claim that if something can be determined to be irreducibly complex, then that is evidence of a creator. The problem is, there is no way to determine whether something is irreducibly complex. The examples creationists give can be countered by existing species that possess the expected intermediate steps leading to the feature in question. The human eye is a classic example, with creationists asking what good is half an eye? Well, it turns out quite a bit. Flatworms only have light-sensitive pigment, but it allows them to detect shadows moving over them. Limpets have their light-sensitive cells in a cup, which allows them to determine the direction of light. Nautiluses have a cup that is almost closed over, which allows the small hole to sharpen the image. Ragworms have a transparent cover over the hole, which protects the interior. Abalones have filled the cup with coagulated fluid, forming a lens that can focus light. And mammals have co-opted muscles around the eye to vary its focus. Each step is an improvement for the individual, and thus something that can be selected for and evolve. Mathematical models show it would take only 1,829 tiny steps over fewer than 400,000 years to achieve an advanced eye from a simple light-sensitive patch of skin.So creationists have moved on to other alleged examples of irreducible complexity, including bacterial flagella, blood clotting, multi-chambered hearts, etc. But in each case scientists have provided plausible evolutionary explanations that require no supernatural intervention. Sometimes, like the eye example, we find more primitive versions of a complex feature in other species, indicating that small steps could lead to the evolution of the more complex feature. In other cases we find features that could have been relatively easily modified from a similar structure originally used for some other purpose. This is called “preadaptation.” Examples include: swim bladders that control buoyancy in fish likely evolving from primitive lungs, and bird wings likely evolving from feathered arms used for breeding displays or to keep eggs warm.One of the most significant examples of preadaptation is the evolution of bacterial flagella. Creationists have long considered the bacterial flagellum the BEST example of irreducible complexity because the system could not function if it were missing any of its 42 proteins. However, other bacteria have a structure with several fewer proteins that has a very similar design to the flagellum, but which is used as a syringe to inject poison rather than for locomotion. Only a few incremental mutations would be required to turn the syringe into a flagellum. That’s not even the ONLY plausible explanation for how flagella could have evolved, but it is sufficient to disprove the claim that bacterial flagella must be irreducibly complex. Thus, creationists have lost their best evidence for irreducible complexity.Not only that, but in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, intelligent design revealed itself to be nothing more than religious-based creationism lacking any scientific merit. The star witness, Michael Behe, was unable to provide ANY credible evidence to support intelligent design, and he admitted that intelligent design proponents have never conducted even a SINGLE experiment that refutes evolution. He also admitted that in order to claim intelligent design is a scientific theory, he had to redefine the word “theory” in such a way that even astrology would qualify as a scientific theory. The advocates for intelligent design lost the case so badly that the presiding judge—who was a conservative Republican, by the way—excoriated them for deliberately lying to the court and for the “breathtaking inanity” of their arguments. After the trial, another leading advocate of intelligent design, William Dembski, predicted there would be much stronger evidence of intelligent design within 5 to 10 years. That was a dozen years ago, and intelligent design has STILL not provided any compelling evidence to support it.Intelligent design failed to make its case for being scientific, but that does not mean one can’t make some predictions about what one would expect to see in biological systems designed by an intelligent creator. For instance, if an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect God created all life in basically its current forms, then we would NOT expect to see inefficient, clunky and problematic “unintelligent” design. Evolution, on the other hand, has to work with whatever is available, so we WOULD expect to see a lot of inefficiency and workarounds in design. So what do we see in nature? Exactly what evolutionary theory predicts:The eyes of all vertebrates, for example, require light to travel through a slightly obscuring thin tissue and blood supply to reach the photoreceptors. The photoreceptors are also inefficiently oriented backward, and the result is an optic blind spot in the middle of our vision. Cephalopods, like octopuses and squid, don’t have this backward orientation, so it’s clear the backward design isn’t necessary for good vision. Other examples include the urethra, which is routed through the prostate, making it prone to infection and swelling with age. But this makes sense if the prostate evolved from tissues in the walls of the urethra. Humans give birth through the pelvis instead of through the lower abdomen, resulting in unnecessary pain, injury and other complications. But it’s what we would expect to see if live birth evolved from a system that originally passed much smaller eggs through the pelvis with ease. And sometimes a human egg will slip through the small space between the ovary and the Fallopian tube, resulting in an abdominal pregnancy that without surgery is almost always fatal to both fetus and mother. But this imperfect connection makes sense if it evolved as an add-on adaptation for live birth in mammals.Probably the most profound evidence of unintelligent design is the recurrent laryngeal nerve found in all vertebrates with necks. It’s a nerve that basically connects the brain to the larynx, a journey that in humans should be just a few inches. However, the nerve instead travels down the neck, loops around the aorta, and travels back up the neck to the larynx, adding THREE FEET to the distance. In giraffes, the nerve is 15' longer than the direct route, and in the extinct Supersaurus, the nerve would have been 100' longer than the direct route! Not only is this inefficient, but it makes the nerve more vulnerable to injury. This makes sense in evolutionary terms if the recurrent laryngeal nerve evolved from gill arches in our fish ancestors and it happened to start out in an inconvenient position for natural selection to act upon. Evolutionarily there’s simply no way the nerve could just avoid looping around the aorta.These are only a few examples of “unintelligent design,” but ALL of them make sense in the light of evolution—where natural selection can only act upon the structures that are available—and NONE of them make sense in the context of a perfect designer easily capable of avoiding such design problems.Another problem related to unintelligent design is the existence of vestigial organs. These are features that no longer perform their original function—such as wings that are no longer capable of flight. Sometimes vestigial organs are preadapted for other purposes that natural selection can act upon, such as ostriches co-opting their vestigial wings for mating displays, and flightless cormorants using their vestigial wings to improve swimming agility, whereas other vestigial wings, like the kiwi’s, are completely useless. Additional examples of mostly or completely useless vestigial features include male nipples, the human tailbone, our “goose bumps” response to cold or fear, hind leg bones in whales, blind eyes in cave fish, and so on. Evolutionary theory predicts the existence of vestigial organs, because as a population evolves into different species to survive in different environments, parts of their old anatomy are no longer needed. They take up valuable metabolic resources and are thus gradually selected against. From the perspective of creationism’s perfect creator, however, what would be the point of having species develop organs that serve no purpose? Creating blind cave fish with useless eyes is pointlessly inefficient and thus evidence AGAINST creationism.Related to vestigial organs is the existence of atavisms. These are dead genes that occasionally mutate and switch back on, resulting in an individual growing a feature no longer expressed by typical members of the species. For example, 1 in 500 whales is born with external rear leg remnants, sometimes even possessing feet and toes. Horses have only one toe per leg, but occasionally some are born with up to three toes, just like their extinct relatives. Sometimes humans are born with functioning tails, just like monkeys. It’s even possible to cause chickens to develop teeth-like structures by providing a single missing protein to otherwise dead genes. These degenerating, leftover genes are what we might expect to find if whales evolved from a land mammal, horses evolved from a three-toed ancestor, humans evolved from a tailed primate, and birds evolved from dinosaurs with teeth. But what sense do they make if all species were instead unique creations by a perfect God?Further related evidence of baggage inherited from our ancient ancestry can be found in embryology. For instance, the embryos of four-legged animals form hind limb buds that develop into rear legs. Whale embryos also form those same hind limb buds, but they are reabsorbed before birth. Baleen whales lack teeth, but their embryos develop teeth which are also reabsorbed before birth. Both whales and humans lack a fur coat, yet their fetuses develop a full coat of fur which is once again reabsorbed before birth. Human embryos also develop tails and an empty yolk sac that disappear as the pregnancy progresses. And like all mammal embryos, human embryos develop fish-like gill arches that turn into different structures in the ear, Eustachian tubes, carotid artery, tonsils, larynx and cranial nerves. Additionally, our circulatory system, kidneys and vertebrae closely resemble those in fish embryos initially, but then alter considerably to become amphibian-like, then reptile-like, before finally developing into a mammalian system. Reptiles also go through the fish-like and amphibian-like stages before developing into the reptilian form, but they don’t go through the mammalian stage. Evolutionarily this makes sense because mammals evolved AFTER reptiles, and embryos develop using the processes inherited from their ancestors. Creationism has nothing to account for ANY of this.Exhibit F: Bad Arguments (part 6)Creationists will often point out that science has yet to explain how the very first life came into existence through natural processes, which known as “abiogenesis.” However, evolution doesn’t describe how the first life occurred; it only describes what happened AFTER life came into existence. Even if a god created the first life, the evidence for evolution SINCE then would remain just as strong. Regardless, we can still make some predictions about what evidence we might expect to see if abiogenesis is true vs. whether creationism is true. In the main abiogenesis model, the simple molecules and environmental conditions of the early, lifeless Earth had to be able to produce the basic building blocks of life. In the creation model, all life was created fully formed, so there should be no evidence indicating that simple chemistry can automatically turn into the basic building blocks of life.So what evidence do we see? Well, if you replicate in a lab the various possible molecular and environmental conditions likely present on the prebiotic Earth—or even in outer space—it doesn’t take long for inorganic molecules to AUTOMATICALLY produce dozens of the complex organic molecules necessary for life. The repeated heating, cooling and irradiation of these molecules, as would be expected on a prebiotic Earth, can also cause the spontaneous formation of ribonucleotides, which are the precursors of RNA and DNA. And exposure of those ribonucleotides to certain natural clays causes them to spontaneously assemble into RNA strands. And RNA is capable of duplicating itself, which is a fundamental requirement for life. These discoveries have led researchers to suspect that the first life may have been based on RNA. Indeed, some viruses—which are the most primitive life on Earth today—are based on RNA rather than DNA.Meanwhile, simple fatty acids that also form naturally in prebiotic conditions AUTOMATICALLY assemble into structures resembling cell membranes. And DNA inserted within those cell membrane-like structures can successfully replicate under the right conditions. This doesn’t mean we know all the steps that led to the formation of the first life—at least not yet—but clearly many of the initial steps occur automatically under completely natural conditions. This is NOT what we would expect to find if creationism is true and all life was created in a single, supernatural event. But it is EXACTLY what we would expect to find if life emerged on its own from non-living molecules.In all the examples I’ve given, evolutionary theory makes predictions that are REQUIRED to be true in order for evolution to be true...and in fact those predictions have proven to be correct. Yet those examples are not the only evidence supporting evolutionary theory. I didn’t even get into island biogeography, sexual selection, polyploid speciation, convergent evolution, and so on, because my primary focus here isn’t to prove that evolution is true, but to show what happens when you compare the predictions of young-Earth creationism with the predictions of evolutionary theory. As you can see, creationism comes up short in every case. The BEST it ever manages is to not be completely incompatible with SOME of the evidence, but in most cases the evidence flat-out contradicts it.And because the evidence doesn’t support creationism, creationists tend to focus their efforts on attacking evolution rather than defending creationism...even though proving evolution wrong would do nothing to support creationism, since you still need supportive evidence to justify accepting a claim. An example of one of these creationist attacks is the claim is that evolutionary theory isn’t scientific because we can’t DIRECTLY observe evolution changing one species into a drastically different species. But since when has science ever required direct observation in order to be valid? We can’t directly observe temperature, radiation, atoms, neuroelectrical activity, the interiors of stars and planets, quantum entanglement, gravity waves, and so on, yet we can use indirect methods to measure and model them accurately, and make successful predictions about them. Like evolution, the whole science of forensics is based on determining what happened in the past, yet nobody would claim that we can’t successfully solve crimes using DNA, fingerprints, gunshot residue, ballistics, etc. Evolutionary science works essentially the same way...only using different tools to study much older events. The indirect evidence from taxonomy, the fossil record, genetics, etc. are as conclusive as any forensic evidence.Creationists have made well over 500 additional claims against evolution, and scientists have refuted all of them. Although responding to every claim here would be impractical—and that’s not the point of this post anyway—if you go to the Talk Origins link I’ve provided in the description bar (or google “creationist claims” and click on the first link), you will find refutations of pretty much every creationist claim ever made.Creationism is a religious belief that cannot accept evidence that contradicts that belief. That means creationism is not scientific, and so it should come as no surprise that the evidence does not support it. The evidence does, however, support evolution, and it does so overwhelmingly. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not studied evolutionary theory or the evidence, or is deliberately ignoring the facts. It’s as simple as that.“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.” — Ashley MontaguReferences and additional material:On the Origin of Species:The Origin of Species by Charles DarwinEvidence for evolution and against creationism:Why Evolution is True, by Jerry A. Coyne, 2009Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism, by Aron Ra, 2016The Scientific Case for Common DescentIndex to Creationist ClaimsExamples of evolution:Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur | Observationshttp://www.darwinwasright.org/observations_speciation.htmlObserved Instances of SpeciationNew Species Can Develop in as Little as 2 GenerationsHuman evolution is still happening – possibly faster than everAn aquarium accident may have given this crayfish the DNA to take over the worldEvolutionary (phylogenetic) trees:Phylogenetic treesPhylogenetic systematics, a.k.a. evolutionary treesThe transitional fossil record:Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQGary Meaney's answer to Why have no fossils been found of humans ape-like creatures to prove evolution?Creationist analysis of human fossils:Comparison of all skullsDating techniques:Evidence against a recent creationMultiple Lines of Evidence for an Old Universe - ArticlesRadiometric dating - WikipediaThe oldest living organisms:Killing PrometheusRadiometric dating accuracy:UCSB Science LineHow reliable is geologic dating?Darwin on human evolution:Darwin Predicts that Human Origins Will be Found in AfricaThe evolutionary timeline:Timeline: The evolution of lifeGenetic 'Adam' and 'Eve' UncoveredCreationist claims about Noah’s Flood:How Could Noah Fit the Animals on the Ark and Care for Them?Problems with the Noah’s Flood claim:Problems with a Global FloodThe Impossible Voyage of Noah's ArkCat SpeciesAnswers in Genesis Adds an (Impossible) Ice Age to the BiblePopulation growth information:World Population GrowthHuman Population CalculatorThe pace of evolution:Not so fast -- researchers find that lasting evolutionary change takes about one million yearsMutations:https://www.livescience.com/33347-mutants-average-human-60-genetic-mutations.htmlhttps://science.howstuffworks.com/life/evolution/evolution9.htmhttp://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.htmlThe evolution of bacterial flagella:http://evolutionfaq.com/faq/isnt-it-true-bacterial-flagellum-could-not-have-evolvedhttp://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.htmlhttp://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/flagellum.htmlKitzmiller v. Dover trial:http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day12am.htmlhttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/day11pm.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/education/judge-rejects-teaching-intelligent-design.htmlEye design:https://thehumanevolutionblog.com/2015/01/12/the-poor-design-of-the-human-eye/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5c34/620326a23adebc113f98c825a885b5a1311f.pdfHuman genetic similarities with other species:https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-and-you/genetics-101/genetic-similarities-of-mice-and-men/https://www.genome.gov/15515096/2005-release-new-genome-comparison-finds-chimps-humans-very-similar-at-dna-levelERVs:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6235/http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#retrovirusesAbiogenesis:http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6360/http://www.dnaftb.org/26/ (RNA self-edits)https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528795-500-dna-could-have-existed-long-before-life-itself/ https://is.muni.cz/el/1431/jaro2008/Bi8350/um/5474473/Poole_98_The_path_from_RNA_world.pdfhttp://exploringorigins.org/fattyacids.htmlhttps://www.popsci.com/researchers-make-artificial-cells-that-can-replicate-themselveshttps://scitechdaily.com/scientists-identify-key-ingredients-when-first-organisms-appeared-on-earth/http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/researchers-may-have-solved-origin-life-conundrumhttps://scitechdaily.com/scientists-identify-exoplanets-with-same-chemical-conditions-as-earth/https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-find-evidence-of-a-protein-that-existed-when-life-began/https://phys.org/news/2017-05-rna-life.htmlhttps://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20918-artificial-cells-made-to-reproduce-thanks-to-dna/https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-solve-puzzle-of-origin-of-life-on-earth/Science and indirect evidence:https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/howscienceworks_05https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observation/Scientist positions on evolution vs. creationism:http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-5-evolution-climate-change-and-other-issues/Talk Origins responses to all creationist arguments:Index to Creationist Claims

No good evidence for evolution? On the contrary. Here’s the major evidence stacked up against creationism:Exhibit A: Taxonomy (part 1)One of the most persistent creationist claims I keep encountering is that there is no compelling scientific evidence for evolution, and that in fact the evidence better supports creationism. Here I will describe the most significant conflicting predictions of evolutionary theory versus young-Earth creationism and compare them with the actual evidence. There’s a lot to address, so this won’t be short, but my intent is to keep it as simple, concise and non-technical as I can so that anyone can understand the evidence.First, let me define the two basic positions: Evolutionary theory is the idea that all life on Earth evolved from a simple common ancestor that formed billions of years ago. Through natural genetic mutations and environmental pressures determining which individuals survive, that ancestor gradually diversified into all existing species. Creationism, on the other hand, claims that the God of the Bible created all species as individual, original “kinds” over the course of a few days some 6,000 years ago.Now for a claim to be scientific, it doesn’t have to have ALL the answers, but it MUST make some testable predictions that could potentially prove the claim false. And the first question to ask is, “If this idea is true, what evidence should we expect to see?” So let’s compare the predictions between evolutionary theory and creationism.First, evolutionary theory predicts that if all today’s species evolved from a single original ancestor that split into different species again and again over billions of years, we should see greater similarity in physical characteristics between species that branched off relatively recently compared to those species that branched off farther back in time. But all species MUST be connected to all other species at some point on this evolutionary tree of life.Indeed, that is exactly what we see. All humans, for example, share with all other apes: a similar skeletal and dental structure, complex brain, full color vision, opposable thumbs, internal organ layout, lack of an external tail, diet, and a range of blood types and diseases. All apes share with all other primates: binocular vision, flattened faces, relatively large brains, an external penis, only two nipples on the chest, bipedal capability, collarbones, prehensile hands and feet with five fingers and five toes, fingernails and toenails, a fatal reaction to Australia’s funnel web spider venom (no other mammals have this vulnerability), and an inability to create their own vitamin C. All primates share with all other mammals: warm-bloodedness, body hair or fur, milk production, single lower jaw bone, and a four-chambered heart. All mammals share with all other vertebrates: an internal skeleton, spinal cord, central nervous system, skull, skin, paired limbs, and closed circulatory system. All vertebrates share with all other animals: a digestive system, the need to consume other life in order to survive, and almost all have the ability to reproduce sexually and control their own movement. All animals share with all other eukaryotes: cells with a membrane-bound nucleus, membrane-bound organelles, and rod-shaped chromosomes. Thus, humans are apes, primates, mammals, vertebrates, animals and eukaryotes. This interconnectedness absolutely must exist in order for evolutionary theory to be true, and so far EVERY species discovered fits into this taxonomic classification system. Ironically, it was a biblical creationist, Carolus Linneaus, who developed this system when he realized that all life shows this tree-like, nested hierarchy...although he couldn’t explain why such a structure exists.One consequence of this tree-like structure is that species can only inherit characteristics from their ancestral line. So if the ancestor of mammals diverged from the reptile line before birds did, characteristics that evolved exclusively in birds—such as feathered wings—could not be found in mammals. Thus, it would be impossible to find such creatures as winged horses, griffins, harpies or angels. Nor would it be possible to find unicorns, centaurs, mermaids, crocoducks or any other species possessing anatomical features from a different evolutionary line that diverged BEFORE those anatomical features developed. That simply cannot happen if evolution is true. And, in fact, there is no credible evidence that any of those species ever existed.So what would creationism predict? Well, an all-powerful God would, by definition, be able to create virtually ANY type of species he wanted, so he would not be limited to the constraints of the evolutionary tree of life. We would thus expect to see taxonomy break down rapidly beyond the species level, rather than show that every species is interconnected to all other life via a branching tree. And there would be no reason NOT to see centaurs, griffins, mermaids, crocoducks and other species that could only exist through special creation. Yet there is no evidence that any such mixed creatures have ever existed. EVERY SINGLE species fits into the structure of the evolutionary tree.Exhibit B: Transitional Fossils (part 2)Another prediction of evolutionary theory is the existence of transitional forms—that is, species possessing physical characteristics of both what they evolved from and what they evolved into. If all life evolved from a common ancestor, then transitional species would HAVE to exist for each fork in the evolutionary tree. They wouldn’t be easy to find, since a speciation event often occurs with just a very small population over a geologically short period of time, and fossilization is EXCEEDINGLY rare, but transitional species MUST exist.When Darwin published his seminal work, On the Origin of Species in 1859, he lamented the lack of any known transitional fossils…but he predicted they HAD to exist if evolution is true. Sure enough, two years later the first transitional fossil was discovered. Named Archaeopteryx, it was a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds. It possessed the bony tail, clawed fingers, toothed jaws and snout characteristic of theropod dinosaurs, as well as the wings, flight feathers, hollow bones and wishbone characteristic of birds. While likely not the direct ancestor of modern birds, Archaeopteryx is nevertheless a perfect example of a form transitioning from one type of species into another.Fossilization is an extremely rare process, since it requires rapid burial in sediment-filled water, creating an oxygen-free environment that preserves hard parts, like bones and teeth, long enough to gradually replace with minerals. This means that the great majority of fossils are marine organisms, and that more than 99% of species are never fossilized. And finding those relatively few fossils in the narrow window between being exposed and eroding away is even more rare. Yet despite those limitations, since Darwin’s time we have discovered many HUNDREDS of transitional fossil species, including those showing the transition of reptiles into mammals, reptiles into dinosaurs, dinosaurs into birds, land mammals into whales, and much more.Researchers have even been able to predict what previously UNDISCOVERED transitional species must have looked like and where they would have to be found in the fossil record. This is how Tiktaalik—a transitional form between lobe-finned fishes and four-legged land animals—was discovered. Researchers had already found the fossils of both lobe-finned fishes and the earliest four-legged land animals, which they then used to predict what a transitional form between them would look like, as well as where it would have lived and the age of the rock formations in which it would be located. They then went out and discovered Tiktaalik right where they had predicted.That’s also how the many transitional forms between early apes and modern humans were discovered. Darwin himself predicted that humans must have originated in Africa because of our similarities to chimpanzees and gorillas. Sure enough, paleontologists exploring Africa have since found numerous fossil species with physical characteristics between early apes and modern humans, all within the right range of dates…exactly what evolutionary theory predicted we should find. You couldn’t ask for better demonstrations of the predictive power of evolutionary theory than these examples.So what would creationism predict? Well if all species were created basically in their current form, there would be no need for the existence of transitional species AT ALL. In fact, their existence would make NO sense and it would be impossible to predict their existence. So the mere fact that transitional fossils exist is evidence AGAINST creationism.This problem is only emphasized when creationists themselves analyze the collection of human transitional fossils to determine which they believe are ape and which are human. Creationism would not predict the existence of human transitional fossils at all, but one thing it WOULD predict is that humans—being a special creation—should be easy to tell apart from all other species. And yet, when creationists evaluate the line of increasingly human-like fossils, they can’t even agree among themselves where the dividing line between human and non-human lie. What could be a better indicator that a species is transitional than that?Two of the few testable claims made by young-Earth creationism are that the universe and all life were created by God 6,000 years ago, and that the entire Earth was drowned in a worldwide flood 4,300 years ago. Apart from the species preserved on Noah’s ark, all animals drowned, many of which were subsequently fossilized. Therefore, creationism predicts that nearly all fossils must be the same age—4,300 years old—and they must be sorted primarily according to flood dynamics.Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, predicts that fossils should vary in age over a span of hundreds of millions of years, and they must be sorted by lineage according to the evolutionary tree. It would thus be completely impossible, for instance, to find human remains in the fossil record before mammals evolved, since humans are a type of mammal and mammals had to evolve before humans could evolve.So how do these predictions compare to the evidence? For starters, since fossils require rapid burial in sediment-filled water, of course many fossils are associated with flooding. But if the fossil record was created by a single, worldwide flood, fossils should be all jumbled together—perhaps sorted somewhat by buoyancy or a species’ ability to escape rising flood waters, as some creationists have predicted. So is that what we actually see? Not even close. As you descend through the fossil record, plants and animals generally become simpler and less diverse, and they are associated with ecosystems of other similarly simpler and less diverse species. Furthermore, those species found higher up in the fossil record more closely resemble currently living species found in the same area as the fossils, whereas those species found lower down in the fossil record are increasingly different. Almost all fossils in the lowest levels look NOTHING like anything alive today. That is EXACTLY what we would expect to find if all species evolved from a simple common ancestor. In fact, evolutionary theory can confidently predict that no one will EVER find naturally occurring fossils of birds, mammals, dinosaurs, reptiles or amphibians among the many fossils in the ancient Cambrian rocks, since none of those animals evolved until more than a hundred million years AFTER the Cambrian formed. Sure enough, no such fossils have ever been discovered there. Creationism can’t account for ANY of that, nor can it make any equally specific, detailed predictions because the fossil record is simply not sorted by flood dynamics.As for determining the age of fossils, there are currently well over 40 different radiometric dating methods in use. Using appropriate, uncontaminated samples, most of these techniques are accurate to within just a 2% margin of error. And the accuracy only increases by using multiple samples and multiple dating methods to verify the results. When these techniques are used to test the ages of fossil samples, the results reveal that life began approximately 3.9 billion years ago, multicellular life 900 million years ago, a wide variety of body types 540 million years ago, land plants 465 million years ago, land vertebrates 397 million years ago, reptiles 310 million years ago, dinosaurs 230 million years ago, mammals 200 million years ago, birds 150 million years ago, the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor 7 million years ago, and modern humans appeared 200,000 years ago. These results closely match the evolutionary tree and they make sense only in the context of evolution. They are clearly far older than the 4,300 year or even 6,000 year creationist timelines, and they make no sense if all life was specially created at the same time.Creationists often point to the wide variety of life appearing suddenly in the fossil record during the Cambrian period—the “Cambrian explosion,” as it’s called—as evidence that life suddenly appeared all at once, as the creationist model claims. But there are a few problems with this. First, more primitive life existed for BILLIONS of years before the Cambrian explosion began, but hard parts suitable for fossilization hadn’t evolved yet. Second, the Cambrian explosion took place over a period of 20 to 25 MILLION years. That’s quite rapid in evolutionary terms, but completely incompatible with the creationist claim of a mere 6,000-year-old Earth and a seven-day creation. Third, the species that appear in the Cambrian bear virtually no resemblance to any species living today. ALL of them are extinct. That too is incompatible with creationism, but it makes sense if most of them died out but some evolved dramatically over hundreds of millions of years into the species we see today.Creationists of course question the accuracy of radiometric dating. However, when multiple, different radiometric techniques are correctly applied to samples from the same geological layers, they all result in similar dates. Plus, there are many non-radiometric dating techniques that ALSO indicate a far more ancient Earth than creationists claim. The oldest living tree is over 5,000 years old, and matching its tree rings with older dead trees creates an unbroken line of tree growth going back almost 14,000 years. That alone contradicts the claim of a 6,000-year-old Earth, but it gets worse. Mitochondrial and chromosomal evidence shows that the most recent woman from whom all current women descended in an unbroken line lived somewhere between 99,000 and 234,000 years ago, and the man from whom all current men descended in an unbroken line lived somewhere between 120,000 and 581,000 years ago. They were each part of existing populations when they lived, and it’s virtually certain they never met. Antarctica has up to 800,000 layers of yearly snow deposits on its permanent ice sheets. Gypsum crystals form exceedingly slowly, and the largest gypsum megacrystals in Mexico could not have formed in less than one million years. The Green River basins in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah have up to 6 million layers of yearly sedimentation deposits. Limestone stalactites form at a rate of only 4" per thousand years, meaning the 60' plus stalactites we’ve discovered must be at least 180,000 years old, but the limestone caves in which they grew would have required tens of millions of years to form. The Americas and Africa are moving apart at a rate of a few inches per year, and both their current distance apart and the distribution of fossils found on both continents indicate they were last in contact 200 million years ago. Tidal friction slows the Earth’s rotation by two seconds per 100,000 years, which means that 380 million years ago the days should have been 22 hours long with 400 days in the year. Corals can be used to test this because they produce both daily and annual growth rings, which can be counted to determine how many days there were in a year for corals radiometrically dated at 380 million years old…and the answer is also 400-day years. So as you can see, we have multiple dating techniques that can be cross-checked to verify the accuracy of radiometric dating.Exhibit C: Noah’s Flood (part 3)The list of evidence for an ancient Earth goes on and on, and NONE of it is consistent with only a 6,000 year old history, nor does it provide ANY support for a worldwide flood 4,300 years ago. But it gets worse when we look at the specific details of the Noah’s flood claim. Just SOME of the more serious problems include:• A handful of people somehow used bronze-age tools to build a large wooden ship in which to cram potentially MILLIONS of animals, along with their many specific dietary and other requirements for an entire YEAR. That much cargo would have sunk the ship immediately. Not only that, but even with today’s advanced tools and engineering it would be impossible to build such a large wooden ship without it immediately breaking apart in rough flood waters.• Most animals would have had to travel IMMENSE distances to get to the ark, including many like termites, snails, sloths, koalas and penguins that have limited mobility, or that can only tolerate a narrow range of environmental conditions, or that have highly specialized diets.• Supposedly there was a single, 18" window in the ark, which would have been entirely inadequate to provide ventilation, resulting in the quick suffocation of all the animals.• ALL the many diseases and parasites specific to each species would have had to be carried by at least one of each animal. Tens of thousands of diseases affect humans alone. I wonder which of Noah’s family members carried all the venereal diseases exclusive to humans....• For nearly all existing fossils to have been created by the flood, right before the rain started falling there had to have been an average of over 2,000 vertebrate species—ranging in size from tiny shrews to massive dinosaurs—for EVERY ACRE of land on the planet. That’s not even counting the more than 90% of species that are invertebrates.• If the rain came from a vapor canopy, it would have had to be superheated. If it came from ice falling from orbit, it would have become superheated upon entering the atmosphere. Add to that the water coming from the “fountains of the deep,” as the Bible describes it, which from even just a mile down would be boiling hot, and there’s easily enough heat to have vaporized the oceans and destroyed virtually all life on Earth.• The seismic activity pulling the continents apart, forcing up mountain ranges, and causing nearly all the world’s volcanoes to erupt at the same time would have poisoned the atmosphere, generated enough heat to vaporize the oceans, and once again destroyed virtually all life on Earth.• The amount of sedimentation that would need to have been mixed into the water to account for all the sedimentary layers being laid down at once would kill virtually all marine life. And most of the remaining life would have died from the radical changes in water salinity.• After the flood, the water covering the entire Earth’s surface would have had to go somewhere, but there is no mechanism for getting rid of anywhere near that much water.• After spending a year in cramped quarters without exercise, the animals would have had to travel up to many thousands of miles across often inhospitable terrain and vast oceans to reach their natural habitats. This includes all the animals that move extremely slowly or can only survive in limited environments.• Almost no land plants or their seeds can survive immersion in water for a year, so after the flood the land would have been barren, providing no food or habitats for the newly released animals.• And just eight stone-age humans would have had to repopulate their former lands across the world, reviving all the lost languages, writing, religions, professions, technologies and other unique societal developments of their former cultures, without showing any interruptions in their historical records, nor mentioning anything about a global flood AT ALL. And those eight people would have had to reproduce so incredibly rapidly that in just 150 years (fewer than eight generations) they would have had enough people to build Stonehenge, the pyramids and numerous cities mentioned in the Bible, as well as populate all of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, and the Americas with MILLIONS of people. All this while experiencing war, disease and global famine during a migration across the entire planet. Even using a global growth rate TWICE as fast as the most rapid ever recorded in human history, there would be fewer than 5,000 people in the entire world in those 150 years, which is nowhere near the MILLIONS of people required to match even the most conservative historical estimates.The realization that the ark described in the Bible would be orders of magnitude too small to fit millions of species and their supplies—even if only young, small specimens were brought on board—has caused many creationists to conclude that new species can evolve after all...at least up to a point. They define the biblical “kind” at the genus or even family level in an attempt to bring the number of species on board the ark from millions down into the thousands. The idea is that there was a single cat kind, a single antelope kind, a single beetle kind, a single two-legged carnivorous dinosaur kind, and so on, and that AFTER leaving the ark they all rapidly evolved into multiple species to account for the tens of millions of species seen both in the fossil record and alive today.But for that to work, all the surviving animals would need to have evolved at a MASSIVELY accelerated rate right after the flood. Just to give one example, the basic “cat kind” would have had to evolve into lions, tigers, leopards, snow leopards, cheetahs, caracals, mountain lions, wildcats, lynxes, bobcats, jaguars, jaguarundis, ocelots, servals, saber-toothed cats, domestic cats, and the rest of the 13 cat genera, 40 cat species and hundreds of subspecies...and do it quickly enough to show up as mummified remains, artwork and written historical records all within a few hundred years of the flood. Ironically, that pace of evolution is FAR faster than evolutionary theory predicts.Not only that, but before splitting into multiple species, each “kind” would have first had to breed up to thousands of groups to then send to all their new environments, some of which were many thousands of miles away. Only THEN could they have evolved into the tens of millions of species that exist today and in the fossil record. And all this supercharged evolution would have had to happen within a few hundred years...only to then abruptly slow WAY down to the pace we see today. So why isn’t there any historical or other evidence of tens of millions of animal groups suddenly appearing, migrating all over the globe, and then temporarily evolving at an incredible rate into a huge variety of new species? Clearly there are some serious problems with this “limited evolution” creationism.But other creationists insist that life cannot evolve beyond the species level—despite the problem of trying to fit many millions of animals onto Noah’s ark. They also claim that there have been no observed instances of species evolving into other species. The primary definition of a species is a population capable of producing fertile offspring. And once you have a genetically isolated population, all it takes is time and continued selective pressure to result in a whole new branch on the evolutionary tree. So do we have any examples of new, successfully breeding populations that can no longer breed with their original populations?Well, evolution is generally a slow process, taking an average of a million years and thousands of generations of environmental pressure to create a new species that PERSISTS. Nevertheless, we do have some good examples of observed evolution. Humans have actually participated in the process over many thousands of years through what is known as artificial selection. It’s the same process as natural selection, only with humans rather than natural environmental pressures determining which traits will survive and spread throughout a population. We’ve bred dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, turkeys, pigeons, etc. that are genetically distinct from their wild ancestors. We’ve taken advantage of unique mutations and cross breeding to evolve a species of grass into corn, a tiny wild fruit into large tomatoes, a seed-filled green fruit into long yellow bananas, and so on. We evolved a single wild plant into domestic cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi. In the lab, researchers have used controlled environments to put intense selective pressure on bacteria and fruit flies, causing them to speciate rapidly. A single species of bacteria can be made to evolve into multiple distinct species within a few hundred generations, and fruit flies can evolve into a new species within just 25 generations.But what about observed speciation in the wild? While the process of studying the evolution of new species in nature is of course more difficult than with artificial selection, there are still many observed instances of populations undergoing speciation. For example, European mice introduced to volcanic islands west of Gibraltar in 1419 evolved into six genetically distinct populations over the course of 500 years. Three species of wildflower that were imported to the US from Europe just 100 years ago evolved into two species of American goatsbeards. Nylon, which was invented in 1935, is a substance so artificial that nothing was able to consume it, but within 40 years a new species of bacteria was discovered that had acquired a mutation allowing it to digest nylon. And in 1981, researchers observed the breeding of two different finch species in the Galápagos Islands, which resulted in a new hybrid species that remains a successful breeding population today. So clearly both the artificial and natural observed evidence doesn’t support those creationists who claim new species cannot evolve.Exhibit D: Genetics (part 4)Another major prediction made by evolutionary science was that ALL species would be found to be constructed using the same fundamental architecture, which can be modified in some way through natural means and then inherited by the next generation. Although the all-powerful God of creationism COULD have used just one architecture, he could have just as easily employed a wide variety of unrelated construction systems—especially considering that humans are supposed to be a special creation different from animals. But then came the discovery that ALL life on Earth is based on nucleotides, almost exclusively in the form of DNA. Furthermore, we learned that DNA frequently acquires mutations that cause inheritable changes. Every person, for example, acquires around 60 new mutations. So evolutionary theory predicted the existence of DNA and mutations, something creationism could NOT have predicted.To counter this discovery, creationists have claimed that a simple common ancestor could never evolve into all the complex life we see today because, according to them, DNA can only lose information, never gain it, and mutations are always harmful. Therefore, their prediction was that there would exist no mechanism for creating new and beneficial genetic information. But then came the discovery that long DNA sequences, called “transposons,” frequently move around from one part of the genome to another, often duplicating themselves in the process and thus creating additional genes, which mutation can then turn into new information. Entire chromosomes can also double spontaneously, and mutations alone can add or subtract information. Furthermore, we discovered that the vast majority of mutations are neutral, with only a small percentage being harmful and a small percentage being beneficial. Even just a tiny percentage of beneficial mutations is all natural selection needs in order to cause evolution to occur.But that’s not all evolutionary theory predicts when it comes to DNA. If all life is genetically related, then species that are closer to humans on the evolutionary tree based on physical characteristics should also share a higher percentage of DNA compared with species that are less similar. Sure enough, we now know that humans share approximately 99.5% of genes with other humans, 98% of genes with chimpanzees, 93% with monkeys, 92% with mice, 90% with cats, 84% with dogs, 80% with cows, 60% with chickens, 44% with fruit flies, 26% with yeast, 18% with plants, and 7% with bacteria. Creationism couldn’t have predicted that we would share ANY genes with other species, much less that the percentage of shared genes would align with the evolutionary tree. Shared genes are a problem even for creationists who accept limited evolution, since it shows genetic connections BETWEEN biblical “kinds,” something they would never predict would exist. What they MIGHT predict is some mechanism that would stop genes from evolving species into a new “kind,” but there is no evidence that any such mechanism exists.Not only that, but in recent decades we’ve discovered that DNA mutates at a predictable rate, and we can use the differences in DNA between any two species to determine how long ago those two species diverged from a common ancestor. The results of this “molecular clock” closely match the evolutionary tree and the radiometric dating of the fossil record. Again, there is no way creationism could ever predict this, but it is EXACTLY what you would expect to see if evolution is true.However, when researchers discovered that chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have 24 pairs of chromosomes, while humans have only 23 pairs of chromosomes, creationists were excited to finally have a genetic discovery that didn’t fit the evolutionary model. It seemed to support their claim that we are not related to the great apes, so how could evolution account for this? Well, genetic researchers made the testable prediction that if evolution is true, somewhere in the human genome there would be evidence of two chromosomes becoming fused together. Chromosomes have a distinct structure in the middle called a centromere, as well as a cap at each end called a telomere. So a pair of chromosomes that had fused together at one end would have TWO centromeres and TWO telomeres embedded within it, as well as two end cap telomeres. Sure enough, researchers found that exact fused structure in one of the human chromosomes. Furthermore, they discovered that genes in the single fused human chromosome were a match for genes found split between the two unfused chimpanzee chromosomes. Once again the evolutionary prediction turned out to be true, while the creationist prediction failed.Another piece of evidence from DNA is the existence of pseudogenes, otherwise known as “dead genes.” These are genes that have become deactivated, usually because a species no longer needs them in order to survive and so they are no longer selected for. For example, all primates lack the ability to produce vitamin C. This likely occurred because there was plenty of vitamin C in our ancestral diet and thus the gene to construct it offered no survival advantage, which allowed it to accumulate damaging mutations. All primates still have the DNA sequence to make vitamin C, but it is missing a vital enzyme which has caused the gene to become inactive. Similarly, dolphins have genes for detecting odors in both water and air. However, since they are no longer land animals, they have little use for detecting odors in air, and now 80% of those genes have become deactivated. Also, only the most primitive mammals—the platypus and spiny anteater—lay eggs, but all other mammals contain dead genes for producing a yolk sac. Human embryos, for example, have a vestigial yolk sac that detaches in the second month of pregnancy and is reabsorbed by the body. If all species were original perfect creations, the existence of these dead genes from ancient ancestors would make no sense. Their existence is thus evidence AGAINST a perfect creator. Pseudogenes only make sense in the light of evolution where nature carries ancestral genetic baggage.Yet another piece of evidence from DNA comes from another type of dead genes called endogenous retroviruses (or ERVs). Retroviruses reproduce by inserting their DNA into the DNA of a host’s cells. On rare occasions they can leave dead genes in the host’s sex cells, which are then passed on to all future descendants of that host. Those dead genes act like an identifying bar code. So if two different species possess the same ERVs in the same locations of their genome, it indicates that the two species share a common ancestor that was infected prior to becoming two separate species. For example, the human genome contains more than half a dozen ERVs that are ALSO shared by chimpanzees, which only makes sense if we once shared a common ancestor. This is another example of nature carrying ancestral baggage that we would expect to see if evolution is true. Creationism, on the other hand, would predict that such connections should NOT exist, and it has no credible explanation for ERVs.Exhibit E: Intelligent Design (part 5)In an attempt to impart scientific legitimacy to creationism, creationists have come up with what they call “intelligent design.” The idea is that some biological features are too complex to have evolved from a simpler state, because if you remove any single component the feature no longer functions, and thus the feature must have been created fully formed by a creator. Creationists call this “irreducible complexity.”So what testable predictions does intelligent design make? Creationists claim that if something can be determined to be irreducibly complex, then that is evidence of a creator. The problem is, there is no way to determine whether something is irreducibly complex. The examples creationists give can be countered by existing species that possess the expected intermediate steps leading to the feature in question. The human eye is a classic example, with creationists asking what good is half an eye? Well, it turns out quite a bit. Flatworms only have light-sensitive pigment, but it allows them to detect shadows moving over them. Limpets have their light-sensitive cells in a cup, which allows them to determine the direction of light. Nautiluses have a cup that is almost closed over, which allows the small hole to sharpen the image. Ragworms have a transparent cover over the hole, which protects the interior. Abalones have filled the cup with coagulated fluid, forming a lens that can focus light. And mammals have co-opted muscles around the eye to vary its focus. Each step is an improvement for the individual, and thus something that can be selected for and evolve. Mathematical models show it would take only 1,829 tiny steps over fewer than 400,000 years to achieve an advanced eye from a simple light-sensitive patch of skin.So creationists have moved on to other alleged examples of irreducible complexity, including bacterial flagella, blood clotting, multi-chambered hearts, etc. But in each case scientists have provided plausible evolutionary explanations that require no supernatural intervention. Sometimes, like the eye example, we find more primitive versions of a complex feature in other species, indicating that small steps could lead to the evolution of the more complex feature. In other cases we find features that could have been relatively easily modified from a similar structure originally used for some other purpose. This is called “preadaptation.” Examples include: swim bladders that control buoyancy in fish likely evolving from primitive lungs, and bird wings likely evolving from feathered arms used for breeding displays or to keep eggs warm.One of the most significant examples of preadaptation is the evolution of bacterial flagella. Creationists have long considered the bacterial flagellum the BEST example of irreducible complexity because the system could not function if it were missing any of its 42 proteins. However, other bacteria have a structure with several fewer proteins that has a very similar design to the flagellum, but which is used as a syringe to inject poison rather than for locomotion. Only a few incremental mutations would be required to turn the syringe into a flagellum. That’s not even the ONLY plausible explanation for how flagella could have evolved, but it is sufficient to disprove the claim that bacterial flagella must be irreducibly complex. Thus, creationists have lost their best evidence for irreducible complexity.Not only that, but in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, intelligent design revealed itself to be nothing more than religious-based creationism lacking any scientific merit. The star witness, Michael Behe, was unable to provide ANY credible evidence to support intelligent design, and he admitted that intelligent design proponents have never conducted even a SINGLE experiment that refutes evolution. He also admitted that in order to claim intelligent design is a scientific theory, he had to redefine the word “theory” in such a way that even astrology would qualify as a scientific theory. The advocates for intelligent design lost the case so badly that the presiding judge—who was a conservative Republican, by the way—excoriated them for deliberately lying to the court and for the “breathtaking inanity” of their arguments. After the trial, another leading advocate of intelligent design, William Dembski, predicted there would be much stronger evidence of intelligent design within 5 to 10 years. That was a dozen years ago, and intelligent design has STILL not provided any compelling evidence to support it.Intelligent design failed to make its case for being scientific, but that does not mean one can’t make some predictions about what one would expect to see in biological systems designed by an intelligent creator. For instance, if an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect God created all life in basically its current forms, then we would NOT expect to see inefficient, clunky and problematic “unintelligent” design. Evolution, on the other hand, has to work with whatever is available, so we WOULD expect to see a lot of inefficiency and workarounds in design. So what do we see in nature? Exactly what evolutionary theory predicts:The eyes of all vertebrates, for example, require light to travel through a slightly obscuring thin tissue and blood supply to reach the photoreceptors. The photoreceptors are also inefficiently oriented backward, and the result is an optic blind spot in the middle of our vision. Cephalopods, like octopuses and squid, don’t have this backward orientation, so it’s clear the backward design isn’t necessary for good vision. Other examples include the urethra, which is routed through the prostate, making it prone to infection and swelling with age. But this makes sense if the prostate evolved from tissues in the walls of the urethra. Humans give birth through the pelvis instead of through the lower abdomen, resulting in unnecessary pain, injury and other complications. But it’s what we would expect to see if live birth evolved from a system that originally passed much smaller eggs through the pelvis with ease. And sometimes a human egg will slip through the small space between the ovary and the Fallopian tube, resulting in an abdominal pregnancy that without surgery is almost always fatal to both fetus and mother. But this imperfect connection makes sense if it evolved as an add-on adaptation for live birth in mammals.Probably the most profound evidence of unintelligent design is the recurrent laryngeal nerve found in all vertebrates with necks. It’s a nerve that basically connects the brain to the larynx, a journey that in humans should be just a few inches. However, the nerve instead travels down the neck, loops around the aorta, and travels back up the neck to the larynx, adding THREE FEET to the distance. In giraffes, the nerve is 15' longer than the direct route, and in the extinct Supersaurus, the nerve would have been 100' longer than the direct route! Not only is this inefficient, but it makes the nerve more vulnerable to injury. This makes sense in evolutionary terms if the recurrent laryngeal nerve evolved from gill arches in our fish ancestors and it happened to start out in an inconvenient position for natural selection to act upon. Evolutionarily there’s simply no way the nerve could just avoid looping around the aorta.These are only a few examples of “unintelligent design,” but ALL of them make sense in the light of evolution—where natural selection can only act upon the structures that are available—and NONE of them make sense in the context of a perfect designer easily capable of avoiding such design problems.Another problem related to unintelligent design is the existence of vestigial organs. These are features that no longer perform their original function—such as wings that are no longer capable of flight. Sometimes vestigial organs are preadapted for other purposes that natural selection can act upon, such as ostriches co-opting their vestigial wings for mating displays, and flightless cormorants using their vestigial wings to improve swimming agility, whereas other vestigial wings, like the kiwi’s, are completely useless. Additional examples of mostly or completely useless vestigial features include male nipples, the human tailbone, our “goose bumps” response to cold or fear, hind leg bones in whales, blind eyes in cave fish, and so on. Evolutionary theory predicts the existence of vestigial organs, because as a population evolves into different species to survive in different environments, parts of their old anatomy are no longer needed. They take up valuable metabolic resources and are thus gradually selected against. From the perspective of creationism’s perfect creator, however, what would be the point of having species develop organs that serve no purpose? Creating blind cave fish with useless eyes is pointlessly inefficient and thus evidence AGAINST creationism.Related to vestigial organs is the existence of atavisms. These are dead genes that occasionally mutate and switch back on, resulting in an individual growing a feature no longer expressed by typical members of the species. For example, 1 in 500 whales is born with external rear leg remnants, sometimes even possessing feet and toes. Horses have only one toe per leg, but occasionally some are born with up to three toes, just like their extinct relatives. Sometimes humans are born with functioning tails, just like monkeys. It’s even possible to cause chickens to develop teeth-like structures by providing a single missing protein to otherwise dead genes. These degenerating, leftover genes are what we might expect to find if whales evolved from a land mammal, horses evolved from a three-toed ancestor, humans evolved from a tailed primate, and birds evolved from dinosaurs with teeth. But what sense do they make if all species were instead unique creations by a perfect God?Further related evidence of baggage inherited from our ancient ancestry can be found in embryology. For instance, the embryos of four-legged animals form hind limb buds that develop into rear legs. Whale embryos also form those same hind limb buds, but they are reabsorbed before birth. Baleen whales lack teeth, but their embryos develop teeth which are also reabsorbed before birth. Both whales and humans lack a fur coat, yet their fetuses develop a full coat of fur which is once again reabsorbed before birth. Human embryos also develop tails and an empty yolk sac that disappear as the pregnancy progresses. And like all mammal embryos, human embryos develop fish-like gill arches that turn into different structures in the ear, Eustachian tubes, carotid artery, tonsils, larynx and cranial nerves. Additionally, our circulatory system, kidneys and vertebrae closely resemble those in fish embryos initially, but then alter considerably to become amphibian-like, then reptile-like, before finally developing into a mammalian system. Reptiles also go through the fish-like and amphibian-like stages before developing into the reptilian form, but they don’t go through the mammalian stage. Evolutionarily this makes sense because mammals evolved AFTER reptiles, and embryos develop using the processes inherited from their ancestors. Creationism has nothing to account for ANY of this.Exhibit F: Bad Arguments (part 6)Creationists will often point out that science has yet to explain how the very first life came into existence through natural processes, which known as “abiogenesis.” However, evolution doesn’t describe how the first life occurred; it only describes what happened AFTER life came into existence. Even if a god created the first life, the evidence for evolution SINCE then would remain just as strong. Regardless, we can still make some predictions about what evidence we might expect to see if abiogenesis is true vs. whether creationism is true. In the main abiogenesis model, the simple molecules and environmental conditions of the early, lifeless Earth had to be able to produce the basic building blocks of life. In the creation model, all life was created fully formed, so there should be no evidence indicating that simple chemistry can automatically turn into the basic building blocks of life.So what evidence do we see? Well, if you replicate in a lab the various possible molecular and environmental conditions likely present on the prebiotic Earth—or even in outer space—it doesn’t take long for inorganic molecules to AUTOMATICALLY produce dozens of the complex organic molecules necessary for life. The repeated heating, cooling and irradiation of these molecules, as would be expected on a prebiotic Earth, can also cause the spontaneous formation of ribonucleotides, which are the precursors of RNA and DNA. And exposure of those ribonucleotides to certain natural clays causes them to spontaneously assemble into RNA strands. And RNA is capable of duplicating itself, which is a fundamental requirement for life. These discoveries have led researchers to suspect that the first life may have been based on RNA. Indeed, some viruses—which are the most primitive life on Earth today—are based on RNA rather than DNA.Meanwhile, simple fatty acids that also form naturally in prebiotic conditions AUTOMATICALLY assemble into structures resembling cell membranes. And DNA inserted within those cell membrane-like structures can successfully replicate under the right conditions. This doesn’t mean we know all the steps that led to the formation of the first life—at least not yet—but clearly many of the initial steps occur automatically under completely natural conditions. This is NOT what we would expect to find if creationism is true and all life was created in a single, supernatural event. But it is EXACTLY what we would expect to find if life emerged on its own from non-living molecules.In all the examples I’ve given, evolutionary theory makes predictions that are REQUIRED to be true in order for evolution to be true...and in fact those predictions have proven to be correct. Yet those examples are not the only evidence supporting evolutionary theory. I didn’t even get into island biogeography, sexual selection, polyploid speciation, convergent evolution, and so on, because my primary focus here isn’t to prove that evolution is true, but to show what happens when you compare the predictions of young-Earth creationism with the predictions of evolutionary theory. As you can see, creationism comes up short in every case. The BEST it ever manages is to not be completely incompatible with SOME of the evidence, but in most cases the evidence flat-out contradicts it.And because the evidence doesn’t support creationism, creationists tend to focus their efforts on attacking evolution rather than defending creationism...even though proving evolution wrong would do nothing to support creationism, since you still need supportive evidence to justify accepting a claim. An example of one of these creationist attacks is the claim is that evolutionary theory isn’t scientific because we can’t DIRECTLY observe evolution changing one species into a drastically different species. But since when has science ever required direct observation in order to be valid? We can’t directly observe temperature, radiation, atoms, neuroelectrical activity, the interiors of stars and planets, quantum entanglement, gravity waves, and so on, yet we can use indirect methods to measure and model them accurately, and make successful predictions about them. Like evolution, the whole science of forensics is based on determining what happened in the past, yet nobody would claim that we can’t successfully solve crimes using DNA, fingerprints, gunshot residue, ballistics, etc. Evolutionary science works essentially the same way...only using different tools to study much older events. The indirect evidence from taxonomy, the fossil record, genetics, etc. are as conclusive as any forensic evidence.Creationists have made well over 500 additional claims against evolution, and scientists have refuted all of them. Although responding to every claim here would be impractical—and that’s not the point of this post anyway—if you go to the Talk Origins link I’ve provided in the description bar (or google “creationist claims” and click on the first link), you will find refutations of pretty much every creationist claim ever made.Creationism is a religious belief that cannot accept evidence that contradicts that belief. That means creationism is not scientific, and so it should come as no surprise that the evidence does not support it. The evidence does, however, support evolution, and it does so overwhelmingly. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not studied evolutionary theory or the evidence, or is deliberately ignoring the facts. It’s as simple as that.“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.” — Ashley MontaguHere is my video version of this post:References and additional material:On the Origin of Species:The Origin of Species by Charles DarwinEvidence for evolution and against creationism:Why Evolution is True, by Jerry A. Coyne, 2009Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism, by Aron Ra, 2016The Scientific Case for Common DescentIndex to Creationist ClaimsExamples of evolution:Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur | Observationshttp://www.darwinwasright.org/observations_speciation.htmlObserved Instances of SpeciationNew Species Can Develop in as Little as 2 GenerationsHuman evolution is still happening – possibly faster than everAn aquarium accident may have given this crayfish the DNA to take over the worldEvolutionary (phylogenetic) trees:Phylogenetic treesPhylogenetic systematics, a.k.a. evolutionary treesThe transitional fossil record:Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQGary Meaney's answer to Why have no fossils been found of humans ape-like creatures to prove evolution?Creationist analysis of human fossils:Comparison of all skullsDating techniques:Evidence against a recent creationMultiple Lines of Evidence for an Old Universe - ArticlesRadiometric dating - WikipediaThe oldest living organisms:Killing PrometheusRadiometric dating accuracy:UCSB Science LineHow reliable is geologic dating?Darwin on human evolution:Darwin Predicts that Human Origins Will be Found in AfricaThe evolutionary timeline:Timeline: The evolution of lifeGenetic 'Adam' and 'Eve' UncoveredCreationist claims about Noah’s Flood:How Could Noah Fit the Animals on the Ark and Care for Them?Problems with the Noah’s Flood claim:Problems with a Global FloodThe Impossible Voyage of Noah's ArkCat SpeciesAnswers in Genesis Adds an (Impossible) Ice Age to the BiblePopulation growth information:World Population GrowthHuman Population CalculatorThe pace of evolution:Not so fast -- researchers find that lasting evolutionary change takes about one million yearsMutations:How Many Genetic Mutations Do I Have?How Evolution WorksMost mutations harmful?Mutations adding informationThe evolution of bacterial flagella:Isn't it True That the Bacterial Flagellum Could Not Have Evolved?The Flagellum UnspunEvolution of the bacterial flagellumKitzmiller v. Dover trial:Day 12, AM: Michael BeheDay 11, PM: Michael BeheJudge Rejects Teaching Intelligent DesignEye design:The Poor Design of the Human EyeHuman genetic similarities with other species:Genetic Similarities of Mice and Men - 23andMe BlogNew Genome Comparison Finds Chimps, Humans Very Similar at the DNA LevelERVs:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6235/http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#retrovirusesAbiogenesis:http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK6360/http://www.dnaftb.org/26/ (RNA self-edits)https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528795-500-dna-could-have-existed-long-before-life-itself/ https://is.muni.cz/el/1431/jaro2008/Bi8350/um/5474473/Poole_98_The_path_from_RNA_world.pdfhttp://exploringorigins.org/fattyacids.htmlResearchers Make Artificial Cells That Can Replicate ThemselvesScientists Identify Key Ingredients When First Organisms Appeared on EarthResearchers may have solved origin-of-life conundrumhttps://scitechdaily.com/scientists-identify-exoplanets-with-same-chemical-conditions-as-earth/https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-find-evidence-of-a-protein-that-existed-when-life-began/https://phys.org/news/2017-05-rna-life.htmlhttps://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20918-artificial-cells-made-to-reproduce-thanks-to-dna/https://scitechdaily.com/researchers-solve-puzzle-of-origin-of-life-on-earth/Science and indirect evidence:https://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/howscienceworks_05https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observation/Scientist positions on evolution vs. creationism:http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-5-evolution-climate-change-and-other-issues/Talk Origins responses to all creationist arguments:Index to Creationist Claims

I’ve had this question so often that I put six months into researching and creating a video comparing the scientific (i.e., testable, falsifiable, reproducible) predictions between creationism and evolutionary theory. If you would prefer to view the video (with its helpful graphics), here it is:If, however, you prefer to read the evidence, here is the script:DOES THE EVIDENCE SUPPORT CREATIONISM?“If what you believe in leaves no verifiable evidence in reality, then there is no reason to conclude that what you believe in has any basis in reality.” — Derek MathiasExhibit A: Taxonomy (part 1)My interest in the creationism versus evolution issue goes back almost 40 years. It even inspired me to get a degree in evolutionary science, as well as to become a naturalist and guide in the Galapagos Islands, and to create this YouTube channel. And one of the most persistent creationist claims I keep encountering is that there is no compelling scientific evidence for evolution, and that in fact the evidence better supports creationism. In a previous video, titled "Why Don't More Scientists Believe in Creationism?," I explained some of the evidence for why virtually all life and earth scientists accept evolutionary theory and reject young-Earth creationism. In this video, I will describe the most significant conflicting predictions of evolutionary theory versus young-Earth creationism and compare them with the actual evidence. There's a lot to address, so this won't be a short video, but my intent is to keep it as simple, concise and non-technical as I can so that anyone can understand the evidence.First, let me define the two basic positions: Evolutionary theory is the idea that all life on Earth evolved from a simple common ancestor that formed billions of years ago. Through natural genetic mutations and environmental pressures determining which individuals survive, that ancestor gradually diversified into all existing species. Creationism, on the other hand, claims that the God of the Bible created all species as individual, original "kinds" over the course of a few days some 6,000 years ago.Now for a claim to be scientific, it doesn't have to have ALL the answers, but it MUST make some testable predictions that could potentially prove the claim false. And the first question to ask is, "If this idea is true, what evidence should we expect to see?" So let's compare the predictions between evolutionary theory and creationism.First, evolutionary theory predicts that if all today's species evolved from a single original ancestor that split into different species again and again over billions of years, we should see greater similarity in physical characteristics between species that branched off relatively recently compared to those species that branched off farther back in time. But all species MUST be connected to all other species at some point on this evolutionary tree of life.Indeed, that is exactly what we see. All humans, for example, share with all other apes: a similar skeletal and dental structure, complex brain, full color vision, opposable thumbs, internal organ layout, lack of an external tail, diet, and a range of blood types and diseases. All apes share with all other primates: binocular vision, flattened faces, relatively large brains, an external penis, only two nipples on the chest, bipedal capability, collarbones, prehensile hands and feet with five fingers and five toes, fingernails and toenails, a fatal reaction to Australia's funnel web spider venom (no other mammals have this vulnerability), and an inability to create their own vitamin C. All primates share with all other mammals: warm-bloodedness, body hair or fur, milk production, single lower jaw bone, and a four-chambered heart. All mammals share with all other vertebrates: an internal skeleton, spinal cord, central nervous system, skull, skin, paired limbs, and closed circulatory system. All vertebrates share with all other animals: a digestive system, the need to consume other life in order to survive, and almost all have the ability to reproduce sexually and control their own movement. All animals share with all other eukaryotes: cells with a membrane-bound nucleus, membrane-bound organelles, and rod-shaped chromosomes. Thus, humans are apes, primates, mammals, vertebrates, animals and eukaryotes. This interconnectedness absolutely must exist in order for evolutionary theory to be true, and so far EVERY species discovered fits into this taxonomic classification system. Ironically, it was a biblical creationist, Carolus Linneaus, who developed this system when he realized that all life shows this tree-like, nested hierarchy...although he couldn't explain why such a structure exists.One consequence of this tree-like structure is that species can only inherit characteristics from their ancestral line. So if the ancestor of mammals diverged from the reptile line before birds did, characteristics that evolved exclusively in birds--such as feathered wings--could not be found in mammals. Thus, it would be impossible to find such creatures as winged horses, griffins, harpies or angels. Nor would it be possible to find unicorns, centaurs, mermaids, crocoducks or any other species possessing anatomical features from a different evolutionary line that diverged BEFORE those anatomical features developed. That simply cannot happen if evolution is true. And, in fact, there is no credible evidence that any of those species ever existed.So what would creationism predict? Well, an all-powerful God would, by definition, be able to create virtually ANY type of species he wanted, so he would not be limited to the constraints of the evolutionary tree of life. We would thus expect to see taxonomy break down rapidly beyond the species level, rather than show that every species is interconnected to all other life via a branching tree. And there would be no reason NOT to see centaurs, griffins, mermaids, crocoducks and other species that could only exist through special creation. Yet there is no evidence that any such mixed creatures have ever existed. EVERY SINGLE species fits into the structure of the evolutionary tree.Exhibit B: Transitional Fossils (part 2)Another prediction of evolutionary theory is the existence of transitional forms--that is, species possessing physical characteristics of both what they evolved from and what they evolved into. If all life evolved from a common ancestor, then transitional species would HAVE to exist for each fork in the evolutionary tree. They wouldn't be easy to find, since a speciation event often occurs with just a very small population over a geologically short period of time, and fossilization is EXCEEDINGLY rare, but transitional species MUST exist.When Darwin published his seminal work, On the Origin of Species in 1834, he lamented the lack of any known transitional fossils…but he predicted they HAD to exist if evolution is true. Sure enough, two years later the first transitional fossil was discovered. Named Archaeopteryx, it was a transitional form between dinosaurs and birds. It possessed the bony tail, clawed fingers, toothed jaws and snout characteristic of theropod dinosaurs, as well as the wings, flight feathers, hollow bones and wishbone characteristic of birds. While likely not the direct ancestor of modern birds, Archaeopteryx is nevertheless a perfect example of a form transitioning from one type of species into another.Fossilization is an extremely rare process, since it requires rapid burial in sediment-filled water, creating an oxygen-free environment that preserves hard parts, like bones and teeth, long enough to gradually replace with minerals. This means that the great majority of fossils are marine organisms, and that more than 99% of species are never fossilized. And finding those relatively few fossils in the narrow window between being exposed and eroding away is even more rare. Yet despite those limitations, since Darwin's time we have discovered many HUNDREDS of transitional fossil species, including those showing the transition of reptiles into mammals, reptiles into dinosaurs, dinosaurs into birds, land mammals into whales, and much more.Researchers have even been able to predict what previously UNDISCOVERED transitional species must have looked like and where they would have to be found in the fossil record. This is how Tiktaalik--a transitional form between lobe-finned fishes and four-legged land animals--was discovered. Researchers had already found the fossils of both lobe-finned fishes and the earliest four-legged land animals, which they then used to predict what a transitional form between them would look like, as well as where it would have lived and the age of the rock formations in which it would be located. They then went out and discovered Tiktaalik right where they had predicted.That's also how the many transitional forms between early apes and modern humans were discovered. Darwin himself predicted that humans must have originated in Africa because of our similarities to chimpanzees and gorillas. Sure enough, paleontologists exploring Africa have since found numerous fossil species with physical characteristics between early apes and modern humans, all within the right range of dates…exactly what evolutionary theory predicted we should find. You couldn't ask for better demonstrations of the predictive power of evolutionary theory than these examples.So what would creationism predict? Well if all species were created basically in their current form, there would be no need for the existence of transitional species AT ALL. In fact, their existence would make NO sense and it would be impossible to predict their existence. So the mere fact that transitional fossils exist is evidence AGAINST creationism.This problem is only emphasized when creationists themselves analyze the collection of human transitional fossils to determine which they believe are ape and which are human. Creationism would not predict the existence of human transitional fossils at all, but one thing it WOULD predict is that humans--being a special creation--should be easy to tell apart from all other species. And yet, when creationists evaluate the line of increasingly human-like fossils, they can't even agree among themselves where the dividing line between human and non-human lie. What could be a better indicator that a species is transitional than that?Two of the few testable claims made by young-Earth creationism are that the universe and all life were created by God 6,000 years ago, and that the entire Earth was drowned in a worldwide flood 4,300 years ago. Apart from the species preserved on Noah's ark, all animals drowned, many of which were subsequently fossilized. Therefore, creationism predicts that nearly all fossils must be the same age--4,300 years old--and they must be sorted primarily according to flood dynamics.Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, predicts that fossils should vary in age over a span of hundreds of millions of years, and they must be sorted by lineage according to the evolutionary tree. It would thus be completely impossible, for instance, to find human remains in the fossil record before mammals evolved, since humans are a type of mammal and mammals had to evolve before humans could evolve.So how do these predictions compare to the evidence? For starters, since fossils require rapid burial in sediment-filled water, of course many fossils are associated with flooding. But if the fossil record was created by a single, worldwide flood, fossils should be all jumbled together--perhaps sorted somewhat by buoyancy or a species' ability to escape rising flood waters, as some creationists have predicted. So is that what we actually see? Not even close. As you descend through the fossil record, plants and animals generally become simpler and less diverse, and they are associated with ecosystems of other similarly simpler and less diverse species. Furthermore, those species found higher up in the fossil record more closely resemble currently living species found in the same area as the fossils, whereas those species found lower down in the fossil record are increasingly different. Almost all fossils in the lowest levels look NOTHING like anything alive today. That is EXACTLY what we would expect to find if all species evolved from a simple common ancestor. In fact, evolutionary theory can confidently predict that no one will EVER find naturally occurring fossils of birds, mammals, dinosaurs, reptiles or amphibians among the many fossils in the ancient Cambrian rocks, since none of those animals evolved until more than a hundred million years AFTER the Cambrian formed. Sure enough, no such fossils have ever been discovered there. Creationism can't account for ANY of that, nor can it make any equally specific, detailed predictions because the fossil record is simply not sorted by flood dynamics.As for determining the age of fossils, there are currently well over 40 different radiometric dating methods in use. Using appropriate, uncontaminated samples, most of these techniques are accurate to within just a 2% margin of error. And the accuracy only increases by using multiple samples and multiple dating methods to verify the results. When these techniques are used to test the ages of fossil samples, the results reveal that life began approximately 3.9 billion years ago, multicellular life 900 million years ago, a wide variety of body types 540 million years ago, land plants 465 million years ago, land vertebrates 397 million years ago, reptiles 310 million years ago, dinosaurs 230 million years ago, mammals 200 million years ago, birds 150 million years ago, the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor 7 million years ago, and modern humans appeared 200,000 years ago. These results closely match the evolutionary tree and they make sense only in the context of evolution. They are clearly far older than the 4,300 year or even 6,000 year creationist timelines, and they make no sense if all life was specially created at the same time.Creationists often point to the wide variety of life appearing suddenly in the fossil record during the Cambrian period--the "Cambrian explosion," as it's called--as evidence that life suddenly appeared all at once, as the creationist model claims. But there are a few problems with this. First, more primitive life existed for BILLIONS of years before the Cambrian explosion began, but hard parts suitable for fossilization hadn't evolved yet. Second, the Cambrian explosion took place over a period of 20 to 25 MILLION years. That's quite rapid in evolutionary terms, but completely incompatible with the creationist claim of a mere 6,000-year-old Earth and a seven-day creation. Third, the species that appear in the Cambrian bear virtually no resemblance to any species living today. ALL of them are extinct. That too is incompatible with creationism, but it makes sense if most of them died out but some evolved dramatically over hundreds of millions of years into the species we see today.Creationists of course question the accuracy of radiometric dating. However, when multiple, different radiometric techniques are correctly applied to samples from the same geological layers, they all result in similar dates. Plus, there are many non-radiometric dating techniques that ALSO indicate a far more ancient Earth than creationists claim. The oldest living tree is over 5,000 years old, and matching its tree rings with older dead trees creates an unbroken line of tree growth going back almost 14,000 years. That alone contradicts the claim of a 6,000-year-old Earth, but it gets worse. Mitochondrial and chromosomal evidence shows that the most recent woman from whom all current women descended in an unbroken line lived somewhere between 99,000 and 234,000 years ago, and the man from whom all current men descended in an unbroken line lived somewhere between 120,000 and 581,000 years ago. They were each part of existing populations when they lived, and it's virtually certain they never met. Antarctica has up to 800,000 layers of yearly snow deposits on its permanent ice sheets. Gypsum crystals form exceedingly slowly, and the largest gypsum megacrystals in Mexico could not have formed in less than one million years. The Green River basins in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah have up to 6 million layers of yearly sedimentation deposits. Limestone stalactites form at a rate of only 4" per thousand years, meaning the 60' plus stalactites we've discovered must be at least 180,000 years old, but the limestone caves in which they grew would have required tens of millions of years to form. The Americas and Africa are moving apart at a rate of a few inches per year, and both their current distance apart and the distribution of fossils found on both continents indicate they were last in contact 200 million years ago. Tidal friction slows the Earth's rotation by two seconds per 100,000 years, which means that 380 million years ago the days should have been 22 hours long with 400 days in the year. Corals can be used to test this because they produce both daily and annual growth rings, which can be counted to determine how many days there were in a year for corals radiometrically dated at 380 million years old…and the answer is also 400-day years. So as you can see, we have multiple dating techniques that can be cross-checked to verify the accuracy of radiometric dating.Exhibit C: Noah's Flood (part 3)The list of evidence for an ancient Earth goes on and on, and NONE of it is consistent with only a 6,000 year old history, nor does it provide ANY support for a worldwide flood 4,300 years ago. But it gets worse when we look at the specific details of the Noah's flood claim. Just SOME of the more serious problems include:• A handful of people somehow used stone-age tools to build a large wooden ship in which to cram potentially MILLIONS of animals, along with their many specific dietary and other requirements for an entire YEAR. That much cargo would have sunk the ship immediately. Not only that, but even with today's advanced tools and engineering it would be impossible to build such a large wooden ship without it immediately breaking apart in rough flood waters.• Most animals would have had to travel IMMENSE distances to get to the ark, including many like termites, snails, sloths, koalas and penguins that have limited mobility, or that can only tolerate a narrow range of environmental conditions, or that have highly specialized diets.• Supposedly there was a single, 18" window in the ark, which would have been entirely inadequate to provide ventilation, resulting in the quick suffocation of all the animals.• ALL the many diseases and parasites specific to each species would have had to be carried by at least one of each animal. Tens of thousands of diseases affect humans alone. I wonder which of Noah's family members carried all the venereal diseases exclusive to humans....• For nearly all existing fossils to have been created by the flood, right before the rain started falling there had to have been an average of over 2,000 vertebrate species--ranging in size from tiny shrews to massive dinosaurs--for EVERY ACRE of land on the planet. That's not even counting the more than 90% of species that are invertebrates.• If the rain came from a vapor canopy, it would have had to be superheated. If it came from ice falling from orbit, it would have become superheated upon entering the atmosphere. Add to that the water coming from the "fountains of the deep," as the Bible describes it, which from even just a mile down would be boiling hot, and there's easily enough heat to have vaporized the oceans and destroyed virtually all life on Earth.• The seismic activity pulling the continents apart, forcing up mountain ranges, and causing nearly all the world's volcanoes to erupt at the same time would have poisoned the atmosphere, generated enough heat to vaporize the oceans, and once again destroyed virtually all life on Earth.• The amount of sedimentation that would need to have been mixed into the water to account for all the sedimentary layers being laid down at once would kill virtually all marine life. And most of the remaining life would have died from the radical changes in water salinity.• After the flood, the water covering the entire Earth's surface would have had to go somewhere, but there is no mechanism for getting rid of anywhere near that much water.• After spending a year in cramped quarters without exercise, the animals would have had to travel up to many thousands of miles across often inhospitable terrain and vast oceans to reach their natural habitats. This includes all the animals that move extremely slowly or can only survive in limited environments.• Almost no land plants or their seeds can survive immersion in water for a year, so after the flood the land would have been barren, providing no food or habitats for the newly released animals.• And just eight stone-age humans would have had to repopulate their former lands across the world, reviving all the lost languages, writing, religions, professions, technologies and other unique societal developments of their former cultures, without showing any interruptions in their historical records, nor mentioning anything about a global flood AT ALL. And those eight people would have had to reproduce so incredibly rapidly that in just 150 years (fewer than eight generations) they would have had enough people to build Stonehenge, the pyramids and numerous cities mentioned in the Bible, as well as populate all of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, and the Americas with MILLIONS of people. All this while experiencing war, disease and global famine during a migration across the entire planet. Even using a global growth rate TWICE as fast as the most rapid ever recorded in human history, there would be fewer than 5,000 people in the entire world in those 150 years, which is nowhere near the MILLIONS of people required to match even the most conservative historical estimates.The realization that the ark described in the Bible would be orders of magnitude too small to fit millions of species and their supplies--even if only young, small specimens were brought on board--has caused many creationists to conclude that new species can evolve after all...at least up to a point. They define the biblical "kind" at the genus or even family level in an attempt to bring the number of species on board the ark from millions down into the thousands. The idea is that there was a single cat kind, a single antelope kind, a single beetle kind, a single two-legged carnivorous dinosaur kind, and so on, and that AFTER leaving the ark they all rapidly evolved into multiple species to account for the tens of millions of species seen both in the fossil record and alive today.But for that to work, all the surviving animals would need to have evolved at a MASSIVELY accelerated rate right after the flood. Just to give one example, the basic "cat kind" would have had to evolve into lions, tigers, leopards, snow leopards, cheetahs, caracals, mountain lions, wildcats, lynxes, bobcats, jaguars, jaguarundis, ocelots, servals, saber-toothed cats, domestic cats, and the rest of the 13 cat genera, 40 cat species and hundreds of subspecies...and do it quickly enough to show up as mummified remains, artwork and written historical records all within a few hundred years of the flood. Ironically, that pace of evolution is FAR faster than evolutionary theory predicts. Not only that, but before splitting into multiple species, each "kind" would have first had to breed up to thousands of groups to then send to all their new environments, some of which were many thousands of miles away. Only THEN could they have evolved into the tens of millions of species that exist today and in the fossil record. And all this supercharged evolution would have had to happen within a few hundred years...only to then abruptly slow WAY down to the pace we see today. So why isn't there any historical or other evidence of tens of millions of animal groups suddenly appearing, migrating all over the globe, and then temporarily evolving at an incredible rate into a huge variety of new species? Clearly there are some serious problems with this "limited evolution" creationism.But other creationists insist that life cannot evolve beyond the species level--despite the problem of trying to fit many millions of animals onto Noah's ark. They also claim that there have been no observed instances of species evolving into other species. The primary definition of a species is a population capable of producing fertile offspring. And once you have a genetically isolated population, all it takes is time and continued selective pressure to result in a whole new branch on the evolutionary tree. So do we have any examples of new, successfully breeding populations that can no longer breed with their original populations?Well, evolution is generally a slow process, taking an average of a million years and thousands of generations of environmental pressure to create a new species that persists. Nevertheless, we do have some good examples of observed evolution. Humans have actually participated in the process over many thousands of years through what is known as "artificial selection." It's the same process as natural selection, only with humans rather than natural environmental pressures determining which traits will survive and spread throughout a population. We've bred dogs, cows, sheep, pigs, turkeys, pigeons, etc. that are genetically distinct from their wild ancestors. We've taken advantage of unique mutations and cross breeding to evolve a species of grass into corn, a tiny wild fruit into large tomatoes, a seed-filled green fruit into long yellow bananas, and so on. We evolved a single wild plant into domestic cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi. In the lab, researchers have used controlled environments to put intense selective pressure on bacteria and fruit flies, causing them to speciate rapidly. A single species of bacteria can be made to evolve into multiple distinct species within a few hundred generations, and fruit flies can evolve into a new species within just 25 generations.But what about observed speciation in the wild? While the process of studying the evolution of new species in nature is of course more difficult than with artificial selection, there are still many observed instances of populations undergoing speciation. For example, European mice introduced to volcanic islands west of Gibraltar in 1419 evolved into six genetically distinct populations over the course of 500 years. Three species of wildflower that were imported to the US from Europe just 100 years ago evolved into two species of American goatsbeards. Nylon, which was invented in 1935, is a substance so artificial that nothing was able to consume it, but within 40 years a new species of bacteria was discovered that had acquired a mutation allowing it to digest nylon. And in 1981, researchers observed the breeding of two different finch species in the Galápagos Islands, which resulted in a new hybrid species that remains a successful breeding population today. So clearly both the artificial and natural observed evidence doesn't support those creationists who claim new species cannot evolve.Exhibit D: Genetics (part 4)Another major prediction made by evolutionary science was that ALL species would be found to be constructed using the same fundamental architecture, which can be modified in some way through natural means and then inherited by the next generation. Although the all-powerful God of creationism COULD have used just one architecture, he could have just as easily employed a wide variety of unrelated construction systems--especially considering that humans are supposed to be a special creation different from animals. But then came the discovery that ALL life on Earth is based on nucleotides, almost exclusively in the form of DNA. Furthermore, we learned that DNA frequently acquires mutations that cause inheritable changes. Every person, for example, acquires around 60 new mutations. So evolutionary theory predicted the existence of DNA and mutations, something creationism could NOT have predicted.To counter this discovery, creationists have claimed that a simple common ancestor could never evolve into all the complex life we see today because, according to them, DNA can only lose information, never gain it, and mutations are always harmful. Therefore, their prediction was that there would exist no mechanism for creating new and beneficial genetic information. But then came the discovery that long DNA sequences, called "transposons," frequently move around from one part of the genome to another, often duplicating themselves in the process and thus creating additional genes, which mutation can then turn into new information. Entire chromosomes can also double spontaneously, and mutations alone can add or subtract information. Furthermore, we discovered that the vast majority of mutations are neutral, with only a small percentage being harmful and a small percentage being beneficial. Even just a tiny percentage of beneficial mutations is all natural selection needs in order to cause evolution to occur.But that's not all evolutionary theory predicts when it comes to DNA. If all life is genetically related, then species that are closer to humans on the evolutionary tree based on physical characteristics should also share a higher percentage of DNA compared with species that are less similar. Sure enough, we now know that humans share approximately 99.5% of genes with other humans, 98% of genes with chimpanzees, 93% with monkeys, 92% with mice, 90% with cats, 84% with dogs, 80% with cows, 60% with chickens, 44% with fruit flies, 26% with yeast, 18% with plants, and 7% with bacteria. Creationism couldn't have predicted that we would share ANY genes with other species, much less that the percentage of shared genes would align with the evolutionary tree. Shared genes are a problem even for creationists who accept limited evolution, since it shows genetic connections BETWEEN biblical "kinds," something they would never predict would exist. What they MIGHT predict is some mechanism that would stop genes from evolving species into a new "kind," but there is no evidence that any such mechanism exists.Not only that, but in recent decades we've discovered that DNA mutates at a predictable rate, and we can use the differences in DNA between any two species to determine how long ago those two species diverged from a common ancestor. The results of this "molecular clock" closely match the evolutionary tree and the radiometric dating of the fossil record. Again, there is no way creationism could ever predict this, but it is EXACTLY what you would expect to see if evolution is true.However, when researchers discovered that chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have 24 pairs of chromosomes, while humans have only 23 pairs of chromosomes, creationists were excited to finally have a genetic discovery that didn't fit the evolutionary model. It seemed to support their claim that we are not related to the great apes, so how could evolution account for this? Well, genetic researchers made the testable prediction that if evolution is true, somewhere in the human genome there would be evidence of two chromosomes becoming fused together. Chromosomes have a distinct structure in the middle called a centromere, as well as a cap at each end called a telomere. So a pair of chromosomes that had fused together at one end would have TWO centromeres and TWO telomeres embedded within it, as well as two end cap telomeres. Sure enough, researchers found that exact fused structure in one of the human chromosomes. Furthermore, they discovered that genes in the single fused human chromosome were a match for genes found split between the two unfused chimpanzee chromosomes. Once again the evolutionary prediction turned out to be true, while the creationist prediction failed.Another piece of evidence from DNA is the existence of pseudogenes, otherwise known as "dead genes." These are genes that have become deactivated, usually because a species no longer needs them in order to survive and so they are no longer selected for. For example, all primates lack the ability to produce vitamin C. This likely occurred because there was plenty of vitamin C in our ancestral diet and thus the gene to construct it offered no survival advantage, which allowed it to accumulate damaging mutations. All primates still have the DNA sequence to make vitamin C, but it is missing a vital enzyme which has caused the gene to become inactive. Similarly, dolphins have genes for detecting odors in both water and air. However, since they are no longer land animals, they have little use for detecting odors in air, and now 80% of those genes have become deactivated. Also, only the most primitive mammals--the platypus and spiny anteater--lay eggs, but all other mammals contain dead genes for producing a yolk sac. Human embryos, for example, have a vestigial yolk sac that detaches in the second month of pregnancy and is reabsorbed by the body. If all species were original perfect creations, the existence of these dead genes from ancient ancestors would make no sense. Their existence is thus evidence AGAINST a perfect creator. Pseudogenes only make sense in the light of evolution where nature carries ancestral genetic baggage.Yet another piece of evidence from DNA comes from another type of dead genes called endogenous retroviruses (or ERVs). Retroviruses reproduce by inserting their DNA into the DNA of a host's cells. On rare occasions they can leave dead genes in the host's sex cells, which are then passed on to all future descendants of that host. Those dead genes act like an identifying bar code. So if two different species possess the same ERVs in the same locations of their genome, it indicates that the two species share a common ancestor that was infected prior to becoming two separate species. For example, the human genome contains more than half a dozen ERVs that are ALSO shared by chimpanzees, which only makes sense if we once shared a common ancestor. This is another example of nature carrying ancestral baggage that we would expect to see if evolution is true. Creationism, on the other hand, would predict that such connections should NOT exist, and it has no credible explanation for ERVs.Exhibit E: Intelligent Design (part 5)In an attempt to impart scientific legitimacy to creationism, creationists have come up with what they call "intelligent design." The idea is that some biological features are too complex to have evolved from a simpler state, because if you remove any single component the feature no longer functions, and thus the feature must have been created fully formed by a creator. Creationists call this "irreducible complexity."So what testable predictions does intelligent design make? Creationists claim that if something can be determined to be irreducibly complex, then that is evidence of a creator. The problem is, there is no way to determine whether something is irreducibly complex. The examples creationists give can be countered by existing species that possess the expected intermediate steps leading to the feature in question. The human eye is a classic example, with creationists asking what good is half an eye? Well, it turns out quite a bit. Flatworms only have light-sensitive pigment, but it allows them to detect shadows moving over them. Limpets have their light-sensitive cells in a cup, which allows them to determine the direction of light. Nautiluses have a cup that is almost closed over, which allows the small hole to sharpen the image. Ragworms have a transparent cover over the hole, which protects the interior. Abalones have filled the cup with coagulated fluid, forming a lens that can focus light. And mammals have co-opted muscles around the eye to vary its focus. Each step is an improvement for the individual, and thus something that can be selected for and evolve. Mathematical models show it would take only 1,829 tiny steps over fewer than 400,000 years to achieve an advanced eye from a simple light-sensitive patch of skin.So creationists have moved on to other alleged examples of irreducible complexity, including bacterial flagella, blood clotting, multi-chambered hearts, etc. But in each case scientists have provided plausible evolutionary explanations that require no supernatural intervention. Sometimes, like the eye example, we find more primitive versions of a complex feature in other species, indicating that small steps could lead to the evolution of the more complex feature. In other cases we find features that could have been relatively easily modified from a similar structure originally used for some other purpose. This is called "preadaptation." Examples include: swim bladders that control buoyancy in fish likely evolving from primitive lungs, and bird wings likely evolving from feathered arms used for breeding displays or to keep eggs warm.One of the most significant examples of preadaptation is the evolution of bacterial flagella. Creationists have long considered the bacterial flagellum the BEST example of irreducible complexity because the system could not function if it were missing any of its 42 proteins. However, other bacteria have a structure with several fewer proteins that has a very similar design to the flagellum, but which is used as a syringe to inject poison rather than for locomotion. Only a few incremental mutations would be required to turn the syringe into a flagellum. That's not even the ONLY plausible explanation for how flagella could have evolved, but it is sufficient to disprove the claim that bacterial flagella must be irreducibly complex. Thus, creationists have lost their best evidence for irreducible complexity.Not only that, but in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case, intelligent design revealed itself to be nothing more than religious-based creationism lacking any scientific merit. The star witness, Michael Behe, was unable to provide ANY credible evidence to support intelligent design, and he admitted that intelligent design proponents have never conducted even a SINGLE experiment that refutes evolution. He also admitted that in order to claim intelligent design is a scientific theory, he had to redefine the word "theory" in such a way that even astrology would qualify as a scientific theory. The advocates for intelligent design lost the case so badly that the presiding judge--who was a conservative Republican, by the way--excoriated them for deliberately lying to the court and for the "breathtaking inanity" of their arguments. After the trial, another leading advocate of intelligent design, William Dembski, predicted there would be much stronger evidence of intelligent design within 5 to 10 years. That was a dozen years ago, and intelligent design has STILL not provided any compelling evidence to support it.Intelligent design failed to make its case for being scientific, but that does not mean one can't make some predictions about what one would expect to see in biological systems designed by an intelligent creator. For instance, if an all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect God created all life in basically its current forms, then we would NOT expect to see inefficient, clunky and problematic "unintelligent" design. Evolution, on the other hand, has to work with whatever is available, so we WOULD expect to see a lot of inefficiency and workarounds in design. So what do we see in nature? Exactly what evolutionary theory predicts:The eyes of all vertebrates, for example, require light to travel through a slightly obscuring thin tissue and blood supply to reach the photoreceptors. The photoreceptors are also inefficiently oriented backward, and the result is an optic blind spot in the middle of our vision. Cephalopods, like octopuses and squid, don't have this backward orientation, so it's clear the backward design isn't necessary for good vision. Other examples include the urethra, which is routed through the prostate, making it prone to infection and swelling with age. But this makes sense if the prostate evolved from tissues in the walls of the urethra. Humans give birth through the pelvis instead of through the lower abdomen, resulting in unnecessary pain, injury and other complications. But it's what we would expect to see if live birth evolved from a system that originally passed much smaller eggs through the pelvis with ease. And sometimes a human egg will slip through the small space between the ovary and the Fallopian tube, resulting in an abdominal pregnancy that without surgery is almost always fatal to both fetus and mother. But this imperfect connection makes sense if it evolved as an add-on adaptation for live birth in mammals.Probably the most profound evidence of unintelligent design is the recurrent laryngeal nerve found in all vertebrates with necks. It's a nerve that basically connects the brain to the larynx, a journey that in humans should be just a few inches. However, the nerve instead travels down the neck, loops around the aorta, and travels back up the neck to the larynx, adding THREE FEET to the distance. In giraffes, the nerve is 15' longer than the direct route, and in the extinct Supersaurus, the nerve would have been 100' longer than the direct route! Not only is this inefficient, but it makes the nerve more vulnerable to injury. This makes sense in evolutionary terms if the recurrent laryngeal nerve evolved from gill arches in our fish ancestors and it happened to start out in an inconvenient position for natural selection to act upon. Evolutionarily there's simply no way the nerve could just avoid looping around the aorta.These are only a few examples of "unintelligent design," but ALL of them make sense in the light of evolution--where natural selection can only act upon the structures that are available--and NONE of them make sense in the context of a perfect designer easily capable of avoiding such design problems.Another problem related to unintelligent design is the existence of vestigial organs. These are features that no longer perform their original function--such as wings that are no longer capable of flight. Sometimes vestigial organs are preadapted for other purposes that natural selection can act upon, such as ostriches co-opting their vestigial wings for mating displays, and flightless cormorants using their vestigial wings to improve swimming agility, whereas other vestigial wings, like the kiwi's, are completely useless. Additional examples of mostly or completely useless vestigial features include male nipples, the human tailbone, our "goose bumps" response to cold or fear, hind leg bones in whales, blind eyes in cave fish, and so on. Evolutionary theory predicts the existence of vestigial organs, because as a population evolves into different species to survive in different environments, parts of their old anatomy are no longer needed. They take up valuable metabolic resources and are thus gradually selected against. From the perspective of creationism's perfect creator, however, what would be the point of having species develop organs that serve no purpose? Creating blind cave fish with useless eyes is pointlessly inefficient and thus evidence AGAINST creationism.Related to vestigial organs is the existence of atavisms. These are dead genes that occasionally mutate and switch back on, resulting in an individual growing a feature no longer expressed by typical members of the species. For example, 1 in 500 whales is born with external rear leg remnants, sometimes even possessing feet and toes. Horses have only one toe per leg, but occasionally some are born with up to three toes, just like their extinct relatives. Sometimes humans are born with functioning tails, just like monkeys. It's even possible to cause chickens to develop teeth-like structures by providing a single missing protein to otherwise dead genes. These degenerating, leftover genes are what we might expect to find if whales evolved from a land mammal, horses evolved from a three-toed ancestor, humans evolved from a tailed primate, and birds evolved from dinosaurs with teeth. But what sense do they make if all species were instead unique creations by a perfect God?Further related evidence of baggage inherited from our ancient ancestry can be found in embryology. For instance, the embryos of four-legged animals form hind limb buds that develop into rear legs. Whale embryos also form those same hind limb buds, but they are reabsorbed before birth. Baleen whales lack teeth, but their embryos develop teeth which are also reabsorbed before birth. Both whales and humans lack a fur coat, yet their fetuses develop a full coat of fur which is once again reabsorbed before birth. Human embryos also develop tails and an empty yolk sac that disappear as the pregnancy progresses. And like all mammal embryos, human embryos develop fish-like gill arches that turn into different structures in the ear, Eustachian tubes, carotid artery, tonsils, larynx and cranial nerves. Additionally, our circulatory system, kidneys and vertebrae closely resemble those in fish embryos initially, but then alter considerably to become amphibian-like, then reptile-like, before finally developing into a mammalian system. Reptiles also go through the fish-like and amphibian-like stages before developing into the reptilian form, but they don't go through the mammalian stage. Evolutionarily this makes sense because mammals evolved AFTER reptiles, and embryos develop using the processes inherited from their ancestors. Creationism has nothing to account for ANY of this.Exhibit F: Bad Arguments (part 6)Creationists will often point out that science has yet to explain how the very first life came into existence through natural processes, which known as "abiogenesis." However, evolution doesn't describe how the first life occurred; it only describes what happened AFTER life came into existence. Even if a god created the first life, the evidence for evolution SINCE then would remain just as strong. Regardless, we can still make some predictions about what evidence we might expect to see if abiogenesis is true vs. whether creationism is true. In the main abiogenesis model, the simple molecules and environmental conditions of the early, lifeless Earth had to be able to produce the basic building blocks of life. In the creation model, all life was created fully formed, so there should be no evidence indicating that simple chemistry can automatically turn into the basic building blocks of life.So what evidence do we see? Well, if you replicate in a lab the various possible molecular and environmental conditions likely present on the prebiotic Earth--or even in outer space--it doesn't take long for inorganic molecules to AUTOMATICALLY produce dozens of the complex organic molecules necessary for life. The repeated heating, cooling and irradiation of these molecules, as would be expected on a prebiotic Earth, can also cause the spontaneous formation of ribonucleotides, which are the precursors of RNA and DNA. And exposure of those ribonucleotides to certain natural clays causes them to spontaneously assemble into RNA strands. And RNA is capable of duplicating itself, which is a fundamental requirement for life. These discoveries have led researchers to suspect that the first life may have been based on RNA. Indeed, some viruses--which are the most primitive life on Earth today--are based on RNA rather than DNA.Meanwhile, simple fatty acids that also form naturally in prebiotic conditions AUTOMATICALLY assemble into structures resembling cell membranes. And DNA inserted within those cell membrane-like structures can successfully replicate under the right conditions. This doesn't mean we know all the steps that led to the formation of the first life--at least not yet--but clearly many of the initial steps occur automatically under completely natural conditions. This is NOT what we would expect to find if creationism is true and all life was created in a single, supernatural event. But it is EXACTLY what we would expect to find if life emerged on its own from non-living molecules.In all the examples I've given, evolutionary theory makes predictions that are REQUIRED to be true in order for evolution to be true...and in fact those predictions have proven to be correct. Yet those examples are not the only evidence supporting evolutionary theory. I didn't even get into island biogeography, sexual selection, polyploid speciation, convergent evolution, and so on, because my primary focus here isn't to prove that evolution is true, but to show what happens when you compare the predictions of young-Earth creationism with the predictions of evolutionary theory. As you can see, creationism comes up short in every case. The BEST it ever manages is to not be completely incompatible with SOME of the evidence, but in most cases the evidence flat-out contradicts it.And because the evidence doesn't support creationism, creationists tend to focus their efforts on attacking evolution rather than defending creationism...even though proving evolution wrong would do nothing to support creationism, since you still need supportive evidence to justify accepting a claim. An example of one of these creationist attacks is the claim is that evolutionary theory isn't scientific because we can't DIRECTLY observe evolution changing one species into a drastically different species. But since when has science ever required direct observation in order to be valid? We can't directly observe temperature, radiation, atoms, neuroelectrical activity, the interiors of stars and planets, quantum entanglement, gravity waves, and so on, yet we can use indirect methods to measure and model them accurately, and make successful predictions about them. Like evolution, the whole science of forensics is based on determining what happened in the past, yet nobody would claim that we can't successfully solve crimes using DNA, fingerprints, gunshot residue, ballistics, etc. Evolutionary science works essentially the same way...only using different tools to study much older events. The indirect evidence from taxonomy, the fossil record, genetics, etc. are as conclusive as any forensic evidence.Creationists have made well over 500 additional claims against evolution, and scientists have refuted all of them. Although responding to every claim here would be impractical--and that's not the point of this video anyway--if you go to the Talk Origins link I've provided in the description bar (or google "creationist claims" and click on the first link), you will find refutations of pretty much every creationist claim ever made.Creationism is a religious belief that cannot accept evidence that contradicts that belief. That means creationism is not scientific, and so it should come as no surprise that the evidence does not support it. The evidence does, however, support evolution, and it does so overwhelmingly. Anyone who thinks otherwise has not studied evolutionary theory or the evidence, or is deliberately ignoring the facts. It's as simple as that.“Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty without any proof.” — Ashley MontaguReferences and additional material:On the Origin of Species:The Origin of Species by Charles DarwinEvidence for evolution and against creationism:Why Evolution is True, by Jerry A. Coyne, 2009Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism, by Aron Ra, 2016The Scientific Case for Common DescentIndex to Creationist ClaimsExamples of evolution:Evolution: Watching Speciation Occur | Observationshttp://www.darwinwasright.org/observations_speciation.htmlObserved Instances of SpeciationNew Species Can Develop in as Little as 2 GenerationsHuman evolution is still happening – possibly faster than everEvolutionary (phylogenetic) trees:Phylogenetic treesPhylogenetic systematics, a.k.a. evolutionary treesThe transitional fossil record:Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQCreationist analysis of human fossils:Comparison of all skullsDating techniques:Evidence against a recent creationMultiple Lines of Evidence for an Old UniverseRadiometric dating - WikipediaThe oldest living organisms:Killing PrometheusRadiometric dating accuracy:UCSB Science LineHow reliable is geologic dating?Darwin on human evolution:Darwin Predicts that Human Origins Will be Found in AfricaThe evolutionary timeline:Timeline: The evolution of lifeGenetic 'Adam' and 'Eve' UncoveredProblems with the Noah's Flood claim:Problems with a Global FloodThe Impossible Voyage of Noah's ArkCat SpeciesPopulation growth information:World Population GrowthHuman Population CalculatorThe pace of evolution:Not so fast -- researchers find that lasting evolutionary change takes about one million yearsMutations:How Many Genetic Mutations Do I Have?How Evolution WorksMost mutations harmful?Mutations adding informationThe evolution of bacterial flagella:Isn't it True That the Bacterial Flagellum Could Not Have Evolved?The Flagellum UnspunEvolution of the bacterial flagellumKitzmiller v. Dover trial:Day 12, AM: Michael BeheDay 11, PM: Michael BeheJudge Rejects Teaching Intelligent DesignEye design:The Poor Design of the Human EyeHuman genetic similarities with other species:https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-and-you/genetics-101/genetic-similarities-of-mice-and-men/ERVs:Evolutionary Aspects of Human Endogenous Retroviral Sequences (HERVs) and Diseasehttp://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html#retrovirusesAbiogenesis:http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.htmlhttps://is.muni.cz/el/1431/jaro2008/Bi8350/um/5474473/Poole_98_The_path_from_RNA_world.pdfhttp://exploringorigins.org/fattyacids.htmlhttps://www.popsci.com/researchers-make-artificial-cells-that-can-replicate-themselveshttps://scitechdaily.com/scientists-identify-key-ingredients-when-first-organisms-appeared-on-earth/http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/researchers-may-have-solved-origin-life-conundrumhttps://scitechdaily.com/scientists-identify-exoplanets-with-same-chemical-conditions-as-earth/https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-find-evidence-of-a-protein-that-existed-when-life-began/https://phys.org/news/2017-05-rna-life.htmlhttps://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20918-artificial-cells-made-to-reproduce-thanks-to-dna/Science and indirect evidence:Observation beyond our eyeshttps://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-theory-observation/Scientist positions on evolution vs. creationism:http://www.people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-5-evolution-climate-change-and-other-issues/Talk Origins responses to all creationist arguments:Index to Creationist Claims