Conservapedia:Counterexamples to Evolution

See Also: the soon-to-be-blocked blocked KingJuan's parody article.

Point-by-Point Refutation of Conservapedia's Counterexamples to Evolution
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Logical Examples
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 * The annual rate of extinction of species far exceeds any plausible rate of generation of species. Expanding the amount of time for evolution to occur makes evolution even more unlikely.
 * The rate of extinction varies massively, as does the rate of speciation. The author's argument seems to be based upon the assumptions that these rates are fixed, and that the number of species must always be increasing, which of course does not make sense. Also note the lack of any actual figures for speciation or extinction. Both are difficult to determine, indeed estimates for the rate of extinction today are based upon massive extrapolations and also make assumptions concerning the number of undiscovered species.


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 * Lack of genetic diversity among the Homo sapiens species. Were evolution and the old earth true, the human population would show a much larger genetic variance.
 * How can these people claim that humans are not diverse? To say that humans lack genetic diversity is to fail to look at other people. The cheetah is endangered because around 10,000 years ago, it went through a genetic bottleneck - environmental conditions changed and they could not adapt fast enough; all other species of its genus were wiped out and only a small number of cheetahs survived so they had to inbreed. This has led to a situation where the current population is severely inbred and really do lack genetic diversity. If Genesis were true (two individuals created then all but 8 drowned) then humans (and every other species on the planet, for that matter) would be equally inbred and show hardly any diversity at all.

Furthermore, complex organs such as eyes arising in highly different species can be explained in two different ways. Firstly, the organ evolved in the distant past, and the species in which it initially evolved later divided into multiple lineages. Similar organs can also arise by convergent evolution, the process by which the beneficial properties of an organ in an environment will tend to favour mutation leading to such an organ. For example, icthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and cetaceans independently all evolved fins, because fins are favoured above hands and feet in an aquatic environment.
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 * Parsimonious repetition of design elements throughout creation, e.g. the eye's appearance in remarkably different species. For such complex structures to arise repeatedly via evolution is impossible, as evolution is an inherently random and historically contingent process.
 * First of all, evolution is not 'inherently random'. Mutation is random, certainly, but it is only the neutral and useful mutations that get preserved. Furthermore, useful mutations, by their very nature, are more likely to be passed on to the offspring of the mutant.

Eyes have independently evolved many times in dozens of distinct lineages.


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 * Pleiotropy, the fact that a change of a single gene can have several different effects, renders the "improvement" of animals by random mutation impossible, as any mutation with a potentially beneficial effect will be coupled with one or more other potentially lethal effects.
 * DNA doesn't know the difference between natural and unnatural selection, nor between natural and unnatural mutation. If pleiotropy guaranteed that all mutations had effects of unpredictable nature but unequivocally predictable lethality, great advances like genetically engineered crops would be impossible (as the gene insertion would be certain to turn the plant into a genetic time bomb), but, sure enough, they exist today.


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 * The development of feathers, which could not have conceivably "grown" from the scales of dinosaurs [sic; more lack of punctuation]
 * Just because something is inconceivable by a creationist does not make it impossible. Granted, there is some debate over the origin of feathers.  However, scientists do not argue over the plausibility of feathers evolving; every scientist you ask will tell you that feathers evolved.  They argue over the specific order that traits of the feather appeared in (to give an example).  Most evidence clearly supports the idea that feathers developed on dinosaurs, and to state that feathers are a problem for the theory of evolution is a blatant lie.


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 * For evolution to be true, every male dog, cat, horse, elephant, giraffe, fish and bird had to have coincidentally evolved with a female alongside it (over billions of years) with fully evolved compatible reproductive parts and a desire to mate, otherwise the species couldn't keep going.
 * No. Most animals, when they evolve, do not became different species, they just mutate slightly. These mutants can interbreed with the original population (and do, for that is the basis of evolution) and if their genes are advantageous may reproduce more and more of their offspring will survive. It takes numerous mutations for an animal to become a separate species, and by that time it will have many relatives with similar mutations. Also, to counter the common accusation of gender evolution being unlikely, the current theory actually places the initial evolution of gender prior to the development of multicellular life; primitive sex can still be seen in yeast today.


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 * There are no historical records of anyone directly observing one species evolving into another, which would certainly be something worth writing about. Surely of the millions of species we have, someone would have witnessed one come into existence had it evolved.
 * Evolution is not the same thing as speciation. An organism can evolve without 'becoming a different species', evolution only results in the creation of a new species when there is some sort of separation of two or more populations of a single species. This doesn't suddenly happen, it is a very gradual process and even once two populations have been separated they may for many generations afterwards still theoretically be able to breed successfully and thus be part of the same species. Examples of speciation are well documented, but it is rarely a case of simply 'looking', to determine whether an organism is part of an new species requires comparison with known species, it's not simply a case that a dog suddenly sprouts wings and, voila, we can say we have a new species. Such examples are very well documented amongst organisms which reproduce rapidly, such as bacteria. The wording is also curious, they seem to be hung up on this idea that one species evolves into another, as if there are pre-set forms which it leaps between.

Beyond that, Martin Boraas proved the possibility of the transition from single-celled to multicellular colonial life in the lab, via the green alga chlorella vulgaris, more than thirty years ago. The accidental introduction of ochromonas flagellates, which feed by phagocytosing smaller single-celled organisms, to a culture tank of c. vulgaris resulted in the organism evolving to form colonies which stabilized in number at eight genetically identical cells (a single eight-celled organism, albeit with undifferentiated cells), making them too large for the flagellates to feed on. This colonial alga has persisted in stable culture and maintained its coloniality. Single-celled organisms and multicellular ones clearly cannot be the same species, and taxonomic markers for algae keyed out this new colonial form in an entirely separate family from the original genus ''chlorella'.


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 * If evolution were to explain where human beings come from, then every personality type should benefit human life. This is clearly untrue because the world is filled with liars, psychopaths, and murderers. These traits clearly do not benefit humanity.
 * Liars, psychopaths, and murderers frequently benefit at the expense of others, and so find themselves in a very good position to pass on their DNA. While a population can not support a majority of psychopaths, as they would kill each other, a small portion can be very successful.


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 * Evolution is internally inconsistent. It posits that all life must continuously improve, but on the other hand, it holds that some creatures, like the horseshoe crab, the alligator, the shark, and the coelacanth, have remained virtually unchanged for improbably long time periods.
 * This is a common misconception. The theory of evolution does not state that species continually improve; it states that species will adapt to best thrive in their environment, or else die out. In the case of the coelocanth and other such animals, their environment has remained the same for a long time, and they are perfectly adapted to it; hence, there is no evolutionary pressure on them, and so they do not evolve in the sense of diversifying or "improving". But the coelocanth species alive today are not the same coelocanth species known from the fossil record; they have speciated over time by genetic drift.


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 * According to evolutionary theory, cavemen with no scientific or genetic knowledge domesticated the wolf (canis lupus) into a different species - the dog (canis familiaris). However, many experts on dog genetics have created hundreds of different dog breeds over the years through selective mating, but they are all the same species. If the cavemen could create new species seemingly by accident, it stands to reason that experts could do so with intentional effort. But since this has not been done, the wolf-dog example seems false.
 * Actually, dogs are wolves; specifically, they comprise two subspecies (Canis lupus familiaris and Canis lupus dingo). Also, resorting to the "cavemen" terminology is not professional because it shows a lack of understanding of early human history; not all early humans lived in caves, and the stereotype of a caveman is as accurate to history as any other historical stereotype.


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Lack of Mechanism
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 * Animals flee to high ground before a deadly tsunami hits their shoreline, defying any plausible materialistic explanation [sic, no punctuation in original]
 * This one makes little sense at all. Just as humans are able to perceive a tsunami coming, so can animals. it doesn't take reasoning ability to figure a big wall of water coming at you is a bad thing. In fact, this is most likely evidence FOR natural selection as the animals too stupid to get to high ground when a tsunami was coming would have quickly died out.


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 * Mutations cause a loss of information, rendering it mathematically impossible for mutations to advance the complexity of life. Similarly, entropy (disorder) increases over time, making it impossible for order to increase on its own.
 * The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy must increase over time in an isolated system--a system in which no matter or energy can be exchanged with surroundings. With an input of energy, greater order can be produced in a system. Living organisms are not isolated systems--energy is inputted by the consumption of glucose and other fuels. Nor is Earth an isolated system - it has an enormous nuclear inferno continuously feeding it with colossal quantities of energy in the form of EM radiation. Incidentally (if I am correctly interpreting the original writer's use of information in the mathematical sense), mutations do not cause a net loss of information--the set of information (the old genome) is replaced in part by a new one (the altered genome.) Also, the common misconception about a loss of information neglects frameshift mutations, recombinations, duplications, inversions, and other manner of mutations that can recombine or duplicate what is present, resulting in new data, and sometimes more.


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 * Ants and other social insects, for at least two reasons: First, their complex social structure is evidence of intelligent design; second, since the overwhelming majority of individuals are workers and do not reproduce, they cannot perpetuate their genetic material, as evolution requires.
 * How is their complex social structure evidence of intelligent design? Their society is quite simple once one understands it. Worker ants forage for food, co-ordinate with each other using pheromones, and construct the colony; drones and queens are used for reproduction, how complex is that? Secondly, most ants do not reproduce, but that is advantageous for the ones that can reproduce. Queens produce the workers, who are no sexual threat; drones, who can be used to reproduce, and other queens to continue the line. It is a very efficient system at cornering the sexual market.


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 * evolution cannot explain artistic beauty, such as the brilliant autumn foliage and staggering array of beautiful marine fish, both of which originated before any human to view them; this lacks any plausible evolutionary explanation
 * This sort of argument from beauty is common, and is applied to a range of things other than foliage such as sunsets, other animals and human endeavors like art. The point assumes that the foliage are the colors they are for us, which matches the abject hubris of your standard believerTM. Evolutionary explanations start with asking why certain colors are more appealing to humans than other colors. Most of the subtler shades of orange and red in sunsets and foliage are the colors of ripe non-poisonous fruits and vegetables. People who found these colors more appealing certainly would last longer than someone that really liked putrid black.

But probably the most powerful argument against beauty as a divine creation is that it is nothing but confirmation bias for evidence. There are as many, if not more things in this world that humans find disgusting. Macroparasites are a good example. Pictures of tape worms, ring worm, ticks, and lice are not shared on postcards during the holidays. Yet these things are as much a part of life as foliage and sunsets. Why do humans find looking at ring worm remnants disgusting and foliage beautiful? Evolution provides the explanatory framework once more. Parasites are easily transferable and contagious so a disgust reaction to any sign of them keeps people away from dangerous hosts.

So evolution can easily explain not only what we find beautiful but what we find disgusting. What's the explanation for tape worms from the "almighty loving omnipotent god" position?


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 * Evolution does not account for the immense amount of information in the genome, as well as the origin of the information-processing systems in the cell. Information always has a sender, who must be God in this case.
 * This argument fails on so many, many levels. First, evolution describes how species come to be (by adapting to their environment), not how the original information got there. Second, the information processing system of the cell is basic chemical reactions. It is like saying that there is no way to explain why hydrogen and oxygen form water (admittedly cells are more complex). If one looks at the youngest cells they are incredibly simple, it is only as time progressed that they became more complex. Third, why does the sender have to be God? A lack of evidence towards one theory does not give evidence towards another hypothesis. For that matter, what is information? Everything exists, everything carries information, but some might make less sense to humans than others. Finally, evolution can explain the information in the genome. Going back to the earlier statement that cells use chemical reactions, any cell that did not have the proper genetic material would not be able to divide properly, or grow, or process nutrients. The cells that had the better genetic material could. So, the information in cells is the result of random chance creating an entity that cell replicates.


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 * the manner in which chickens return to their chicken coops at the same time, and enter the chicken coops in the same order, each day
 * Buh? How does this disprove evolution? I've owned chickens, up to fourteen at a time, and they don't all return to the coop at the same time. They trickle back to the coop as dark approaches because they know that there is food there and they know that it's warmer, drier, and more secure than spending the night out with the foxes, owls, coyotes, etc. Entering the coop in the same order each day? Assuming that that's true, why wouldn't it be a reflection of the pecking order? Social hierarchies in animals are a way of decreasing the overall amount of competition for resources. Given the choice, would you rather wait in a line at the cafeteria, with occasional squabbles with line-cutters, or engage in a free-for-all at each mealtime, perhaps expending more calories than you can get from the meal?


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 * Symbiosis - There are many examples where creatures rely on each other to survive which could not arise through evolution. Grass cannot survive without a certain fungus that helps it fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and the fungus can't survive without the grass. They must have appeared on earth at the same time.
 * This claim is wrong on numerous levels. Firstly, there are multiple varieties of symbosis in paired species: commensalism (one organism benefits, the other is indifferent), mutualism (both organisms benefit from the interaction) and parasitism (one organism benefits, the other is harmed). This claim only considers mutualism, and considers it wrongly at that. Commensal relationships require no long-term evolutionary explanation - the organism unaffected by the interaction has no incentive to expend effort to terminate it, and the organism that benefits benefits, so it pursues the interaction. Parasitic relationships are moderated by evolutionary pressure - many parasitic organisms have extremely complex life cycles that would be seriously disrupted if they killed any of their various hosts, so over time the most lethal parasites have been selected out of the gene pool - they caused too much harm to survive long enough to reproduce. In tandem with this, host organisms have evolved defenses against parasites. The two effects are largely independent and nothing prevents them from working concurrently. Finally, in considering mutualistic relationships, evolutionary explanations for them are easy: they arise when the species involved are more evolutionarily competitive with the relationship than without it, for whatever environmental reason - subsequently, populations that pursue the relationship are selected for and populations that do not are selected against.

At undersea cleaning stations, cleaner fish of many species gather in huge groups to give larger fish thorough goings-over for parasites and other marine schmutz. The larger fish might be tempted to eat the cleaners, but are hard-pressed to remove the parasites themselves, creating a selective pressure favoring fish that do not attempt to eat cleaner fish. The ready supply of food made available by participating in cleaning also creates selective pressures on the cleaner fish to clean more efficiently. Mutualistic relationships are perfectly capable of arising through evolutionary mechanisms.


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 * Consciousness - No animal displays self-awareness (such as clothing), morality, tool-making, or self-sacrifice to the same extent that man does. It is unclear how a random mutation could have arisen which accounts for humanity's significantly higher cognitive ability.
 * The rest of the great apes all use rudimentary tools to help in food gathering and for social comforts. Most nursing mothers in nature will sacrifice themselves against predators to protect their young.

Morality and self-awareness are inventions of mankind. Modern humans are around 200,000 years old in the history of life, but self-awareness only appears to go back about 60,000 years. Clothing likely originated with the need to stay warmer during colder climates.

Bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, elephants, all great apes and the European magpie are all capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors, which is a reliable indicator of a considerable level of self-awareness.

For an explanation of how "random mutation" could account for humanity's higher cognitive ability, one need only to look at the history of proto-homo skull sizes. Cranium sizes increased and cognitive functions followed.


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 * Humans exhibit behaviors such as performing science, creating art and music, dancing, and a number of other intellectual and artistic behaviors which could not have been produced by random mutations. There is no known evolutionary reason why these should be favored.


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 * Trematode parasites, like many other kinds, lack a plausible evolutionary phylogeny, though they can easily be explained by a teleological design.
 * How do they lack a plausible evolutionary phylogeny? They seem rather simple; they are parasites that evolved to take advantage of mollusks.


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 * In addition, evolution cannot explain the many complex sex-determining systems. For example, in most mammals, females have two X chromosomes whereas males have an X and Y chromosome, but in birds, many insects, and other organisms, the situation is reversed. In flies, sex is determined the ratio of non-sex chromosomes to X chromosomes (so that males have only one X whereas females have two). It is impossible for evolution to create these new sex-determining systems ex nihilo.
 * Yes, such states are highly advantages. If two animals have different chromosomes, then those animals can correct genetic damage and allow for multiple beneficial mutations to come together. The different systems show that in different niches, different forms of sex related genes are beneficial. For that matter, we have traced this back to eukaryotes, we all share this common ancestor.


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 * Several species of fish in the Arctic ocean have chemicals in their blood that essentially act as anti-freeze. Evolution requires gradual change, leaving no plausible explanation as to how the fish survived before developing this trait.
 * Breaking news: fish can move.

The claim that tunicate blood is 'based on' vanadium is misleading, if not outright false, especially since it seems to be implying that vanadium serves as a substitute for iron/hemoglobin as an oxygen-transport system. In fact, vanadium seems to play no role in oxygen transport in tunicate blood -- they have hemocyanin (the blue-green protein that carries oxygen in the blood of mollusks) in their blood which may perform this role, although that's also unclear. Vanadium's biological function remains a matter of ongoing research; the tunicates expend a lot of energy to concentrate it from seawater and maintain the highly acidic intracellular conditions needed to keep it reduced, so they must be deriving some benefit from it, but it's not known what that benefit is. It may be to make them unpalatable to predators (certain forms of vanadium are moderately toxic), or perhaps it serves a function in the synthesis of the tough 'tunic' that gives structure to the organism. In other marine life, vanadium is used to produce certain enzymes (cf. vanadium bromoperoxidase). Did you know that tunicates are the only animals that can synthesize cellulose, by the way? Also, while tunicates are chordates they are not vertebrates, so the 'used in other vertebrates' is an error as well.
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 * The blood of tunicates such as the sea squirt is based on the rare element vanadium instead of the abundant iron used in other vertebrates, which would have required a complete re-tooling of its entire circulatory biochemistry
 * It would only require a 'complete re-tooling of its entire circulatory biochemistry' if it ever used iron in this manner in the first place, yet there is no evidence to suggest that this was the case. Why the author assumes it must have used iron before switching to vanadium? No idea.


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 * Animals exist in isolated places without any plausible motivation or means for getting there, such as on remote islands or more than 1200 feet high on top of the vertical cliffs of Devils Tower. Even humans (though large and intelligent) were unable to ascend the peak until 1893, and required specialized climbing equipment.
 * The remoteness of such locations:
 * May not always have been the case (one island eroding into two, landmasses splitting off from each other via plate tectonics)
 * May confer a survival advantage (fewer other species to compete with)
 * May not be a barrier to every species. Squirrels, rats and lizards can climb rough rocks without undue effort, and the height of Devil's Tower is hardly a barrier to birds.


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Maladaptation
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 * Jellyfish in Hawaii, which swarm to the beaches precisely 9 to 10 days after each full moon
 * The full moon causes a plankton bloom, which the jellyfish then feed on.


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 * Variation in chromosome count (ploidy) is impossible in evolution. One member of a species with 2 sets of chromosomes cannot mate with a member with 4. Thus, for the chromosome count of a species to change (and thus account for the variety of counts in nature) a vast portion of a species would have to evolve a new chromosome set simultaneously.
 * Typical anti-plant bias. Polyploidy is absolutely RAMPANT in the plant kingdom, and new examples have not only repeatedly been seen but have formed the backbone of agriculture. Many strains of grains and fruits exploited by humans are polyploid versions of diploid ancestors. Cross-species plant hybrids that result in unusual numbers of chromosomes can be interfertile with themselves, other hybrids or even with one or the other of the parent species. The chemical colchicine is frequently used in plant breeding to cause deliberate polyploidy.

Tetraploidy is seen in some fish, amphibians, reptiles, and insects.

Chromosome number in animals (even humans) is not so immutable as Conservapedia would have you believe, either. Chromosomal translocation is just one mechanism to alter the number of chromosomes in an animal.


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 * The human prostate surrounds the urethra and in doing so provides many benefits. Evolutionists consider the structure to be poor design, which should mean that natural selection would have eliminated that design.
 * The prostate is an example of a 'good enough' evolutionary product. Prostate hypertrophy and prostate cancer tend to occur in older men - those who have already passed their peak reproductive years. If you father children in your teens or twenties or thirties or forties, and then develop BPH and are miserable throughout your fifties before dying of urinary obstruction and kidney failure in your sixties, Mother Nature doesn't care, and the tendency toward prostatic enlargement is not selected against. Similarly, breast cancer has not been eliminated by natural selection because it is predominantly a disease of older women who are already beyond their childbearing years; even carriers of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations tend to reproduce before they develop breast cancer. The same is true for Huntington's disease, or Alzheimer's, or familial polyposis syndromes, etc., etc.

The 'many benefits' quoted in the reference are simply Panglossian attempts to attribute positive qualities to every aspect of the gland's anatomy: the gland has multiple short ducts, so that must be better than some other arrangement because God designed it that way. It sits between the bladder and urogenital diaphragm so it must help keep the urethra from kinking (although the bladder is quite fixed in position along its inferior aspect, so this is moot). It must help control urination, because surgical removal results in incontinence (never mind that to cut the prostate out requires cutting multiple nerves that run through the prostate to other areas. By that logic the sewer line going into my house controls my telephone, because when I take a backhoe and dig up the front yard to get at the sewer line the phone goes dead. As does the electricity. And is that gas I smell? I should have called the digging hotline...).
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 * Inability to account for widely observed altruism among animals, as it reduces an animal's ability to survive.
 * This seems to be an editor's opinion more than an argument against evolution. It is unknown how exactly altruism would be deleterious to a population's survival, except in cases where overpopulation would create artificial shortages of resources. Primates show many examples of altruism that enhances the survival of the population. Many primates care for the elderly or sick among their populations without endangering the rest. Lemurs often work in large groups to guard against predators.

Soldier Termites readily die in battle in order to protect the entire mound without with any benefit supplied. Whether this could truly be called altruism is debatable however it does increase the chances of the species, more specifically - the family, survival.

As there are no examples of which species engage in altruism that reduces an animal's ability to survive, it is difficult to counter-argue the statement in the first place, except in generalities.

In social species, survival may be viewed as something populations do, rather than individuals. What appears to be altruism may just be a survival strategy.


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 * Too many deleterious mutations. Each generation of humans has far more negative mutations than the posited natural selection can remove. Evolution is thus impossible as species would become nonviable long before they could diverge.
 * Citation needed. The creationist claim on the universally negative effects of mutations is ubiquitous but unsubstantiated by any non-creationist research. There are two additional problems with this: firstly that most mutations are neutral, and most "negative" mutations still would not likely be negative enough to be selected against, and secondly that in the context of modern civilization the severe negative effects (e.g. acute intermittent porphyria) can be directly addressed by modern medicine, obviating their evolutionary impact.

First, semantics. How exactly is evolution meant to remove HIV from the human race when HIV is not part of the human race to begin with? HIV has only been widespread for ~30 years. One, maybe two human generations. Nowhere near enough time for natural selection to do its work. HIV, however, has such a high rate of mutation and short generation time that it can evolve new strains in the course of a single infection, allowing it to evade the immune system. Also considering that immunity to a specific disease is generally not a heritable trait and that the human immunodeficiency virus, as suggested by its name, disables the immune system, it should be blindingly obvious why we have not evolved immunity to it. Even if this were not the case, HIV does not render its victims sterile nor normally kill them prior to reaching sexual maturity.
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 * Evolution should have removed HIV from the human race as we would have built an immunity to it, much like bacteria do to anti-biotics, yet we have not. In fact the continued existence of disease is proof against evolution as natural selection would have left only humans who were immune to them.
 * This 'counterexample' is so spectacularly wrong that it's difficult to know where to begin.

Additionally, a non-negligible proportion of white people of European origin carry a mutation granting resistance or even total immunity to HIV. Based on molecular studies of our DNA, it is believe that this immunity is a serendipitous side effect of a mutation which grants resistance or immunity to bubonic plague, which (clearly to anyone with even the most trivial knowledge of European history) would have been strongly selected for over a period of several centuries in the not-terribly-distant past.


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 * Schizophrenia is a disorder that causes a person to be unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. It is an inherited disorder and affects nearly 1 in 100 people. Scientists still have yet to explain what causes it, but one this is for certain, if evolution were true, it should have eliminated such an obvious disability long ago.
 * Schizophrenics are still able to reproduce and pass the condition on to future generations. The condition does not always manifest itself in an obvious way until later in life, potentially after a schizophrenic has reproduced, and evolution doesn't care what happens to us after we've reproduced.


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 * Male-pattern baldness has no evolutionary explanation. It is not observed in non-human species, and because it decreases the likelihood of finding a mate, it should have been selected out a long time ago.
 * Male-pattern baldness is known to exist in other primates, including chimpanzees, gorillas, and macaques. It likely arose to convey some kind of social message, although what specifically remains the subject of debate. There is no evidence that baldness plays a role in mate choice -- attractiveness is culturally constructed and not all people find the same traits attractive. Moreover, many men start going bald long after they have fathered children and have passed the trait along.


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Wrong prediction
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 * "[T]he loss and addition of large DNA sequence blocks are present in humans and gorillas, but not in chimps" even though "the gorilla is lower on the primate tree than the chimp and supposedly more distant to humans. How could these large blocks of DNA--from an evolutionary perspective--appear first in gorillas, disappear in chimps, and then reappear in humans?"
 * Mutations can add and remove information. The Information would not have appeared, disappeared and then reappeared in humans, since we have a common ancestor with apes and chimps. Our ancestor would have had these blocks of information, it would have been passed to apes and humans, and chimps would have lost it with a mutation. Just because the apes are more distant to humans doesn't mean we cannot share some DNA with them that isn't in chimps.


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 * Lack of any vestigial organs in the human body. While evolutionists used to claim dozens or even hundreds of human traits and organs were vestigial, useless items disused through evolution, we now know what functions they all have, including the appendix (the classic example).
 * Vestigiality does not require that a structure has absolutely no function in the organism. Rather, it implies that a structure has lost all or most of its original function. The human appendix can have a role as a reservoir for intestinal bacteria and still be vestigial, because in the other apes it is a much larger organ that acts as a fermenter for cellulose digestion. A whale's vestigial pelvis may still serve as an attachment point for abdominal muscles, but it no longer functions as a bony support framework for hind limbs. Here is a great link to a site showing ten vestigial organs http://science.discovery.com/top-ten/2008/organs/organs.html. Next question please.


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 * Lack of any demonstrable vestigial parts of the human genome. While evolutionists often claim that regions of the genome are "junk DNA" and would not have been placed there by a designer, none have actually shown this to be true, and much so-called "junk DNA" has been shown to be useful.
 * That is once again incorrect (why am I not surprised?). Humans have a broken gene that in other animals produces Vitamin C, but in humans and primates does not. Humans Chromosome 2 also has numerous vestigial parts due to the way it was formed.


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 * While evolutionists argue that there are examples of "bad design" in the bodies of many organisms, such as "flaws" in the human spine and sinus system, evolutionists fail to realize that, by their own theory, natural selection should have removed these things! The simpler explanation, that these represent degeneration from an original, created perfect form, is the superior one.
 * Huh, please repeat that. Were not the last two counterexamples (laughably inaccurate as they were) about how humans were not flawed enough, but this counterexample is on how humans are too perfect? Yes, man is both perfect and imperfect simultaneously. That makes sense (How can I express sarcasm online? How?!). Sorry, my anger at the stupidity of that statement got the better of me. To answer the question, there are multiple answers. First, some of these "bad designs" could be neutral or advantages in other situations. Second, some of these "bad designs" may not have affected the human until later in life, when they would have already passed on their genes. Third, many transitions, such as body shape, are very gradual; this is what is meant when the human spine is discussed; the human spine only recently adapted for upright walking; this is a key difference between our current existence and the transitional forms of our species's ancestors, as shown by the fossil record.

Also, if there is a created perfect form, and our current features are degenerations from it, that would mean that either god is incapable of creating us in said perfect form, or unable to maintain it, and in either case we end up delving into the workings of a prospective deity, which make the explanation far from simple, and terribly inaccurate, as there is no evidence for a perfect form.


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 * We have the perfect number of teeth to fit in our mouths. While creationism perfectly accounts for that result, evolutionism predicts a contrary result: As our faces evolved from chimpanzee-like faces to human faces, the shortening of the muzzle would have caused the teeth to become overcrowded in the mouth.
 * Excuse my while I tell my wisdom teeth that I have the perfect number of teeth. This is just parody now, right? We don't have 'the perfect number of teeth to fit in our mouths'; there is no such perfect number. If our teeth were half as big we could have twice as many, and if they were twice as big we wouldn't need so many. The same processes that gave us a shorter muzzle than our common ancestor with the other apes gave us smaller teeth. Wisdom teeth do produce overcrowding if you haven't already lost a few teeth by the time they try to erupt. If there is no overcrowding of teeth in humans, why are there so many orthodontists? Why do folks have to have teeth pulled to achieve a decent bite?


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 * Human fertility is rapidly declining, disproving evolutionary improvement in humans and also suggesting a brief timeline for human existence.
 * Citation Please. What is the cause? Is it environmental? Is it social? Just saying that humans are not reproducing as much does not mean that evolution is wrong. There are numerous factors (such as environmental and social) that could lead to this. For that matter, how does this suggest that humans have only existed for a brief time? Has this been a continual decline or a recent one? If it is a recent decline than this suggests that a new factor has entered. It's also worth noting that a higher rate of fertility is not necessarily an improvement. Perhaps smaller families confer an advantage within our species. Rearing children is expensive (both financially and physically), so evolutionary pressures may lead a species to reproduce in smaller numbers, while investing more resources in their offspring. Would the author believe that mice are biologically superior to us because their gestation period of 20 days produces on average 10-13 offspring? Even a staunch Catholic, such as Andy Schlafly, would struggle to get anywhere near that level of fertility.


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 * Evolutionist theory predicts that in the case of convergent evolution, a particular structure such as an eye that evolves in an optimal form in one species can later evolve in a suboptimal form in a different species. No such result has ever been observed.
 * There are thousands of such examples. Birds of prey, for instance, have vastly better eyes than humans, who in turn have vastly better eyes than slugs. Going beyond simple visual acuity, comparing the octopodal eye to the human one showcases this perfectly: octopi have eyes in which the optic nerve attaches in a ring around the edge of the retina, where human eyes (and the eyes of all other vertebrates) simply 'plug' the optic nerve into part of the retinal space. Octopus eyes consequently have no blind spot (unlike those of vertebrates), in addition to numerous other benefits, conferring clear survival advantages.

In any case, there is no Platonic ideal of an eye. There's no "optimal" form. There are forms that are good enough to provide an advantage, and there are forms that improve on those forms enough in a particular setting to offer a bigger advantage. But there is no perfect eye. If we were to go to a planet orbiting a star that produce far more infrared radiation and far less visible light than our sun, unaided human eyes would be quite useless, but the eyes of snakes and mosquitoes would fare rather well as they can see parts of the infrared spectrum. Butterflies, which appear to have much wider visual ranges than any other animal taxon, would likely continue to see just fine. Any organism's fitness in a given environment depends on what the environment is. Fitness is only contextual.


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 * Constantly mutating, drug-resistant pathogens such as MRSA have been demonstrated to be the result of devolution rather than evolution. This is the exact opposite of what evolutionary theory predicts.
 * In other words, you just agreed that mutations can lead to a new strain that is harder to wipe out than before, thus conferring an evolutionary benefit.

There is no such thing as devolution - descent with modification doesn't go in reverse.


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Missing fossils
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 * The remarkable whale, which is a mammal, has no plausible evolutionary ancestor.
 * The prevailing theory holds that whales are descended from a four-limbed terrestrial creature, as supported by the remnants of rear limbs (vestigial "leg" bones) in their skeletal structure. Current molecular evidence places the hippopotamus as their most closely-related land kin (this doesn't mean that whales descended from hippos, but that they descended from the same ancestor) (Darwin suggested black bears-to-whales evolution in a completely hypothetical example, not as his true scientific guess, and yet this example is frequently quote mined by creationists to put up supposed "holes" in the theory of evolution. Even without all the modern fossil evidence of whale evolution, Darwin knew that black bears weren't the ancestors of whales, as they are both modern creatures.)


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 * No transitional forms appear for horses, instead different and distinct horse-like animals appear in the fossil record
 * Hyracotherium leporinum is a paleothere, a member of a family morphologically basal to both horses and brontotheres. The very first equid fossil found and Montmartre in Paris in the nineteenth century was a single tooth, used by Georges Cuvier to sketch an entire animal, which well matched later skeletons found in the same gypsum quarries. There are also the genera eohippus, orohippus, epihippus, and may more. The fossil lineage of horses may well be complete.


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 * The enormous gaps and lack of intermediate species in the fossil record, once all the frauds are removed.
 * "All the frauds" are hardly numerous, and scientists themselves are the ones that call them out when they're discovered (cf. Piltdown man, Nebraska Man, archaeoraptor). See list of transitional forms. EvoWiki, another project of the RationalMedia Foundation, has a page on this as well. Archaeoraptor never fooled the scientific community; the individual who presented it to scientists was advised from the beginning that it was probably a composite, and all of the few scientists who saw it before it was discarded from consideration considered it to be one. Nebraska Man was premature speculation voluntarily retracted by its 'discoverer' when it became clear that it was wrong and which was never subjected to peer review anyway, and Piltdown man was taken out of public showing for decades prior to its final exposition as a fraud because the scientists and curators who examined it found it profoundly unconvincing from very early on.


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 * No clear transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms.
 * Ignoring for the moment that there are numerous examples of existing organisms that are intermediate between unicellular life and obligate multicellular life (bacterial clusters, algal clusters, colony organisms, slime molds, etc.), the statement that a single cell in a multicellular organism cannot survive 'on its own' is misleading. No cell can survive 'on its own' if it is placed in an environment to which it is poorly adapted. Every living cell is able to absorb nutrients from its environment, metabolize them, and excrete wastes. Some cells can do this under a wide range of conditions; others are specialized - but unicellular organisms can be just as dependent on narrow environmental parameters as are the individual cells of a multicellular organism. Take as an example the extremophile bacteria that can survive only in a narrow band around undersea vents - they are no less finicky than the neurons of a mammalian brain.

Also, what form would a transition between a single- and multi-cellular organism even take? If it has one cell, it's unicellular. If it has more than one, it's multicellular. Not much room for a transitional form. Unless you want to count multicellular organisms that can be divided into single cells, survive, and reform, like sponges; or unicellular organisms that can cluster into larger forms and then disperse again, like slime molds. Heck, human life starts out unicellular and then becomes multicellular, so we could be a transitional form too.

As noted above, evolutionary transition from unicellular to multicellular life was observed decades ago, and the multicellular form persisted in culture. Martin Boraas' experiments are a big deal, and quite a poke in the eye for Conservapedia and other denialists.


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 * Mammalian fur and body hair. There is no known evolutionary pathway for the development of fur, and no fossil evidence of hair evolving from scales, even though it survives very well.
 * Yes, there is an evolutionary pathway for fur, update yourself. It was found in a study by the Medical University of Vienna. In this study, it was found to be a byproduct of a common ancestor of birds, lizards, and mammals. Hair did not evolve from skin, but in fact is more related to claws. In lizards and chickens, a gene allows claws to form, made of keratin, but in mammals a similar gene allows hair to grow. Hair is likewise made primarily of keratin.


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 * A lack of any evolution from prehistoric forms has been demonstrated for many species.
 * It seems odd that Conservapedia is recognising prehistoric forms and the fossil record. It is true that some animals have remained almost the same for millions and millions of years, but that is because the animal is best adapted to survive in its habitat. The shark, for example, being at the top of the food chain, faces much less natural selection pressure than an animal lower down on the chain.

A clue for "post-prehistoric era" evolution: the moth Biston Betularia started to appear in a black "variant" since the beginning of industrial revolution, due to the increased smoke/soot/dust.


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 * Where are the human ancestors? (That is, the ones that weren't frauds.)
 * In museums all over the world. There's homo erectus, homo habilis, homo heidelbergensis, homo rudolfensis, australopithecus afarensis, and more. There are so many species verifiably part of our lineage that they can become difficult to tell apart, and some biologists believe the human fossil record may be reasonably considered complete.


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Paradoxical fossils
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 * The fact that new discoveries, such as Raptorex, routinely call into question key dogmas of evolutionism and require the "immutable" laws of evolution to be reassessed. By contrast, creationism has prevailed in the face of scientific discoveries for six thousand years.
 * How does the discovery of the raptorex call into question evolution? Evolution is a theory, not a law, and theories change over time. Theories incorporate new facts, to help better explain how the subject of the theory works. For that matter, the raptorex calls nothing about evolution into question. This animal evolved just like every other animal evolved. As for creationism prevailing in the face of scientific discoveries, the simple answer is that it has not. Creationism has not appeared in any peer reviewed journals. It has not made any discoveries. It has not made any predictions. And even the the things in biology that evolution "can't explain" get fewer and fewer all the time. Creationism has failed, not prevailed.


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Irreducible Complexity
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 * The immune system is irreducibly complex, as without one which is thoroughly developed, an organism would not be able to resist any infection.
 * Actually, an incomplete immune system can resist infections. Mucus, for example, is utterly indiscriminate, and works simply by trapping pathogens before they can enter the bloodstream.

Similarly, macrophages and dendrocytes do not require the presence of any other immune cells to function; they simply phagocytose pathogens as they find them.

Antibodies are almost identical in structure to the MHC molecules on the surface of macrophages, and their molecules' respective genes are also very similar. It is likely that at some point in evolution, the MHC gene was duplicated, and the duplicate mutated to form the antibody gene complex, which in turn led to the evolution of B-lymphocytes.


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 * The extraordinarily long neck of the giraffe. It serves no function (the theory that giraffes use the long neck to eat from high tree branches was never true). The presence of valves in the neck (which are necessary because of its great length) raises a question of how one could have arisen without the other being there first.
 * The giraffe's long neck has a perfectly fine evolutionary explanation, but it may not be the one you know from school. Giraffes are often said to have long necks because they need these to feed on high branches. This has two problems. 1) How did they feed without the long necks? 2)But wait! They're taller than all the plants in their natural environment!

Hmmm...

Turns out that the neck of the giraffe is actually a textbook example of sexual selection. Giraffes compete for access to mates, and those with long necks are better competitors. These giraffes then mate more, and they pass on their long-neck genes to more offspring. (Including their female offspring - the gene's not on the Y chromosome.)


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 * The long legs of the giraffe: if a random mutation led to long legs without a long neck or vice versa, the animal would be unable to survive.
 * No warrant is given for this; it's basically an argument from incredulity. If it were true, and there's no reason presented to believe that it is, the sexual selection noted above that has given giraffes long necks wouldn't necessarily be the only selection occurring. A longer neck would affect the animal's balance, and the need for balance would have selected for longer-legged giraffes from among the longer-necked ones.


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 * The development of wings, as intermediary wing stubs would have no use, and be a competitive disadvantage.
 * Demonstrably untrue, as the Flying Squirrel manages perfectly well with the sort of flaps of skin that act as proto-wings.


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 * The flagellum [sic, no comma in original] a multi-part cellular motor which fails to function if a single part is removed is the classic example of irreducible complexity and cannot arise according to the theory of evolution.
 * The flagellum fails to perform its present function if a part is removed. We don't know that that was always its function . We have evidence of evolution repurposing existing structures, as in the . Morganucodon has a skull structure intermediate between mammals and reptiles in which some bones function as both jawbones (as in reptiles) and ear bones (as in mammals). See also irreducible complexity, as the specific example of the flagellum reaches far into PRATT territory.


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 * Many bats which live in caves employ a type of sonar in order to navigate and find prey. Evolutionists propose that the bat evolved from a squirrel-like animal, but a squirrel would have no use for a sonar system. The bats can't fly without sonar, and an animal that can't fly doesn't need it. Therefore, bats must have been created with fully functioning sonar and flight.
 * This will come as news to the 42 genera/173 species of megachiroptera that don't use echolocation, as well as the species of echolocating birds and insectivores that are not bats. So bats can fly without sonar, and an animal that can't fly can use it. It's something of an open question as to how many times echolocation has evolved/been lost/re-evolved among the various chiroptera (bats).


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 * The organ and brain development required for retinal imagery require a base level of complexity, making a primitive form useless and impossible under evolution.
 * Even flatworms have primitive eyes. An eye doesn't have to be capable of resolving fine images; something as simple as a light-sensitive membrane telling the organism if it's facing a light source can constitute an "eye". Each incremental improvement between such a membrane and modern eyes conferred a distinct advantage. Darwin refuted this proposition in his original publication of the theory of evolution:To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.


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 * Blood clotting is a unique process unlike any other in the body, without which the smallest cut could be life-threatening. Only a fully developed clotting system is functional and therefore could not have evolved through intermediate stages.
 * Thank you, Ken Miller: "evolution doesn't start from scratch, and it doesn't need fully-assembled systems to work. Remember the lobster system as an example. Blood clotting evolved there from two pre-existing proteins, normally found in separate compartments of the body, that had a fortuituous interaction when damage to a blood vessel brought them together. Once that interaction was established, natural selection did the rest."


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 * The ear contains three tiny bones that transmit sound waves from the eardrum to the cochlea. Because of the complicated arrangement of those bones, transitional forms (which have never been found) would have served no purpose.
 * Both claims in the second sentence are simply wrong. Per Wikipedia, the evolution of the auditory bones in mammals is "one of the most well-documented and important evolutionary events, demonstrating both numerous transitional forms as well as an excellent example of exaptation, the re-purposing of existing structures during evolution." Many of the claims made in this list disregard the concept of exaptation entirely, though it has been observed to happen and disposes of far more objections than just this one. In addition, just as primitive eyes confer advantages over not having eyes at all, primitive ears are perfectly capable of conferring advantages over not having ears at all.

See the above mention of morganucodon for more information.


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Uncategorized
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 * Evolution would result in modern languages having one common ancestral language, and for nearly a century linguists insisted that there must be one. There is not, and linguists now accept that there are completely independent families of languages.
 * Conservapedia must not be aware of geographical differences and tribal differences. If he had a common ancestral language we would expect it to be lost due to the simplicity of the language only being spoken not written.


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 * Pterosaurs; a scientist recently stated that they could not have flown, but why then did they evolve wings?
 * The scientist is not named, no evidence is provided and the purported source is New Scientist - a pop science magazine, not a peer-reviewed journal. Google turns up no such New Scientist article, but does turn up a related article in National Geographic, which is known for its abysmal exercise of editorial review (as in the cases of Piltdown man, Nebraska Man and archaeoraptor, which the peer-reviewed journals tore to pieces).

Since it's asserted with no shred of proof, it requires no shred of proof to dismiss.

Besides that, even if pterosaurs were in fact flightless (which claim we've already dispensed with), there exist many birds that serve as ideal counter-counterexamples to the claim implied here (that wings would never exist on a flightless creature): emus, ostriches, rheas, kiwis, cassowaries, kakapos, takahes and penguins, as well as the extinct phorusrhacids (terror birds), moas and dodos. These things clearly can't or couldn't fly. But evolution offers an explanation for why they have or had wings, which is consistent with vast, independent and cross-confirmatory bodies of morphological, paleontological and molecular evidence. These birds have wings because they evolved from other birds that had wings, which evolved from flying dinosaurs like microraptor, which the evidence suggests evolved from feathered dinosaurs incapable of flight, which evolved from other dinosaurs, which evolved from earlier reptiles, which evolved from amphibian tetrapods. Cdesign proponentsists can offer no such explanation because the very existence of these creatures falsifies the claims they're making.


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 * No other animal exhibits religion. A far better explanation than random mutations is that humans were given the capacity to be religious by a loving God who wants a relationship with His creations.
 * Even if it is true that God exists and gave humans the capacity to love Him, it doesn't imply a special creation; many Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians take the view that humans evolved naturally from an ape-like ancestor, and God breathed souls into early humans at some point.

Furthermore, this fails to account for non-monotheistic religions. If God specifically granted humans the ability to have a close relationship with Him, then why did the incredibly bloodthirsty Mayan religion, with its emphasis on human sacrifice, ever exist? Why did the pagan European and Middle Eastern religions not only exist, but predate Judaism? Why do Hinduism, Buddhism, and various animistic and shamanistic religions, which have nothing to do with God, still exist all over Africa and Asia as well as among some Native Americans?

Finally, religion can serve to make a tribe more fit for survival even if their deities/patron spirits/whatever do not exist. Religion provides a unifying framework that holds the tribe together and provides handy authority for prevailing moral codes, which facilitates social cohesion.

If only I and my friends have a certain inside joke, does that prove that God gave us the inside joke?

A creator has never been observed. Lack of evidence for one theory is not proof of another. Do you guys remember the Lenski affair? In Lenski's experiment it was shown that E. coli evolved to feed off citrate under aerobic conditions. Although what exactly defines 'species' in the case of bacteria is debatable, certainly one of the defining characteristics of E. coli has heretofore been the inability to metabolize citrate under those conditions. Speciation among the Galapagos finches has been observed in our lifetimes. 'Mere' speciation will not satisfy those who subscribe to the model of 'kinds', since they can always draw a larger circle around the new species and claim that it lies in the same 'kind' as the ancestor species; to wit, a new lizard species is still a lizard. But even that isn't a problem, because Martin Boraas' experiments proved the independent evolution of multicellular, if undifferentiated, plants from single-celled algae on a time scale so short that the original experiment could have been done in a single semester of an undergraduate biology lab, and multicellular organisms clearly cannot be the same species as single-celled ones.
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 * Evolution requires that random mutations can cause one kind to change into another, but this has never been observed.
 * 'One kind'...kind of what? The author has got evolution mixed up with creationism. There's no magical transformation of one species into another pre-determined species. Look up 'speciation'.

There cannot be any modern speciation event that generates a new kind, because the old, closely related species will still be around to be included in the same 'kind'. Humans are still apes, which are still primates, which are still mammals, which are still therapsids, which are still vertebrates, which are still chordates, which are still animals (there's more to the cladistic definition than that, but you get the idea).


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 * The existence of two symmetrical kidneys, which are unnecessary in most people, lacks a plausible evolutionary explanation based on functionality alone. Because evolution falsehoods mislead most people into thinking they need their second kidney, "the average waiting time for the organs from a deceased donor in the United States is five years" and "3,916 patients waiting for a kidney in 2006 died before one became available."
 * More parody that has been embraced by Andy as sincere, even though the original poster was blocked as a vandal.

There are a whole bunch of issues here, if one takes the counterexample seriously.

First, why single out the kidneys? The human body has all sorts of redundancies, both of functional capacity and number. A person can get along entirely normally with a single thyroid lobe, or a single parathyroid gland (that's one out of four, mind you!), or many fewer feet of intestine, or a single adrenal gland, or a single testicle or ovary, or half a pancreas, or half a liver, or no spleen, or no appendix, or no gallbladder, or a single breast (if female and wishing to breast feed) or no breasts (if male, or female-not-wishing-to-breastfeed). Teeth can be done away with altogether. One lung is a bit trickier, but doable with some limitations on activity. Having one eye didn't keep Columbo from being an ace detective. Heck, children can have half a brain removed and still be productive members of society.

Second, kidneys are paired organs because they arise, embryologically, from the intermediate mesoderm. The intermediate mesoderm is two bands of tissue that lie parallel to the long axis of the embryo, on opposite sides of the developing spinal cord/spine. The mesodermal tissue in general gives rise to bilaterally symmetric structures, as opposed to the endodermal layer which gives rise to nonpaired organs like the stomach, gall bladder, pancreas, and liver (don't quibble about the pancreas). Even the heart and aorta start out as paired structures that arise from mesodermal tissue, then undergo a series of rotations and fusions to form a single structure.

Third, who doesn't know that you can donate a kidney and live to tell the tale? If Conservapedia has poll results that indicate that one of the reasons that folks don't sign up to be living kidney donors is an evolution-based belief that two kidneys are necessary, we'd love to see it. And if it's only an evolutionary belief, why are creationists and Conservapedians (who are allegedly all aware that they don't need the extra kidney) not lining up at hospitals to give away their organs pro bono? That would be some compassionate conservatism right there.

Fourth, there are plenty of other explanations for the shortage of living kidney donors, like the prohibition on any kind of compensation for donors imposed by Al Gore's National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, the nonzero risk of dying on the operating table, the synergy between the two aforementioned factors, fear (rational or otherwise) of an increased vulnerability to disease once the kidney is gone and a whole host of others. Stephen Levitt noted in Superfreakonomics that Iran actually allows the payment of fees for donated organs and does not experience such a kidney shortage.


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 * Circadian phenomena -- internal 24-hour clock mechanisms of humans and other living beings -- defy material explanation. Examples include how some people are unable to change the timing of their need for sleep for each day, and how plants exhibit clock-like behavior regardless of their exposure to sunlight. In addition, there is a weekly clock cycle for many phenomena, which has a clear biblical basis but defies any materialistic explanation.
 * Continuing the theme of 'if I don't understand how it works, it must be magic'. The Circadian rhythm has been shown to be controlled by specific genes. Electrical signals between cells can regulate the release of hormones for example. Plants can indeed show 'clock-like behaviour' without exposure to sunlight since the Circadian rhythm is endogenous, sunlight simply acts as a synchroniser.


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 * If religion were as harmful as evolutionists claim, natural selection would have phased it out, but it continues, meaning evolutionists are wrong about both evolution and the supposed harmful effects of religion.
 * Well, we'll assume that the last word is supposed to be religion, otherwise their argument makes even less sense (which is saying something). Cancer is harmful, yet it still occurs, and that's to name one of only many thousands of illness that affect humans. Evolution is not an intelligent force that can simply identify a harmful thing and decide to get rid of it, and even if natural selection would eventually get rid of religion, it is a relatively recent aspect of human existence. In actual fact, religion may have been an advantage in evolutionary terms and many evolutionists have made this very argument, insofar as it acts as a cohesive force for a population, enabling increased cooperation, allowing them to out-compete other groups (as the Israelites' bloody conquest of their territory, if it occurred as described, would testify). The question of whether religion is harmful is normally from a moral perspective not from a biological, so the author of this 'argument' has got yet another thing mixed up.


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 * Scientists have found proof that the first chicken came before the first egg, consistent with a special creation of chickens but not with a gradual descent with modifications from a proto-chicken and proto-egg.
 * PZ Myers pointed out the flaw in this study, in that other birds make use of different kinds of proteins for producing eggs, and that the evolution of ovocleidin was not coincident with the evolution of eggs; ovocleidin developed from prior proteins, which were used to form eggs since before birds branched away evolutionarily from reptiles. Eggs came even before birds. A mutation would have taken place at conception or within an egg such that an animal similar to a chicken, but not a chicken, laid the first chicken eggs. These eggs then hatched into chickens that inbred to produce a living population. Hence, in this light, both the chicken and the structure of its egg evolved simultaneously from birds that, while not of the same exact species, gradually became more and more like present-day chickens over time.
 * }

''Put any general criticism of Conservapedia's methodology behind these counterexamples and any miscellaneous counter-counterexamples you can think of here. Think of this as the free-for-all section.''