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That’s under the assumption that evolution works as taught in gradeschool. Under big-step evolution, no such contradiction exists. Indeed the evidence would te

That’s under the assumption that evolution works as taught in gradeschool. Under big-step evolution, no such contradiction exists. Indeed the evidence would tend to point towards big-step being the primary mechanism of speciation (fossil gaps, bizzareness of many intermediary states), but this is such a strange proposition to folks who have a P != NP prior that they tend to dismiss it out of hand.

kolinko 2y ago
The contradiction is still valid in big step evolution. Kind of like guessing a passcode to a lock. You still try all the combinations, but there are no intermediate steps - you either guess it all at once, or not at all. If we see a bunch of locks opened by someone who couldn't have had the code, it doesn't mean they had a method to open. They could've just spent a lot of time guessing.
- basil-rash 2y ago
  Indeed, we need to look at external factors like time/energy expenditure to determine the efficiency of the operation in order to have a hope at constraining its method. If the NSA were to suddenly publish a list of 1,000,000,000 broken SHA512 keys, and there was no sign of any spikes in energy expenditures, we could strongly suspect that they did not generate them from brute force means. Similarly, if we have hundreds of millions of distinct species on the planet, and only a few years of time on the planet (relative to the rate at which we've observed beneficial random mutations actually occurring), we can suspect that the bulk of the speciation did not occur through stochastic means.
andrewflnr 2y ago
Fossil gaps don't imply much except that fossilization is rare and dependent on conditions. And there's are definitely lots of well preserved, smooth transitions. I don't even know what you think "bizarreness of intermediate forms" implies, but it still looks consistent with small steps to me. Notably "bizarre" is a highly subjective judgement that really has no place in this sort of argument. Granted, sometimes those small steps come faster than others, e.g. adaptive radiations. But there's still only so big a change you can make in a single generation that both doesn't immediately render the organism nonviable and gets through all the checks designed to prevent mutations. Anyway, last I heard the biggest driver for speciation was just reproductive isolation, so unguided genetic drift can make the two sides incompatible.
- basil-rash 2y ago
  The bizarre intermediary forms are specifically those that do not appear, and that would make no evolutionary sense to exist. Things like feathers. Now, evolutionists will come up with fanciful untested (untestable), unobserved (unobservable) narratives in attempt to jam such cases into their world view – and that's all well and good, I do the same. I just don't pretend to call my interpretation scientific, I call it religious/faith-based. They'd do well to do the same.

kolinko 2y ago

The contradiction is still valid in big step evolution. Kind of like guessing a passcode to a lock. You still try all the combinations, but there are no intermediate steps - you either guess it all at once, or not at all. If we see a bunch of locks opened by someone who couldn't have had the code, it doesn't mean they had a method to open. They could've just spent a lot of time guessing.

basil-rash 2y ago
Indeed, we need to look at external factors like time/energy expenditure to determine the efficiency of the operation in order to have a hope at constraining its method. If the NSA were to suddenly publish a list of 1,000,000,000 broken SHA512 keys, and there was no sign of any spikes in energy expenditures, we could strongly suspect that they did not generate them from brute force means. Similarly, if we have hundreds of millions of distinct species on the planet, and only a few years of time on the planet (relative to the rate at which we've observed beneficial random mutations actually occurring), we can suspect that the bulk of the speciation did not occur through stochastic means.

andrewflnr 2y ago

Fossil gaps don't imply much except that fossilization is rare and dependent on conditions. And there's are definitely lots of well preserved, smooth transitions. I don't even know what you think "bizarreness of intermediate forms" implies, but it still looks consistent with small steps to me. Notably "bizarre" is a highly subjective judgement that really has no place in this sort of argument. Granted, sometimes those small steps come faster than others, e.g. adaptive radiations. But there's still only so big a change you can make in a single generation that both doesn't immediately render the organism nonviable and gets through all the checks designed to prevent mutations. Anyway, last I heard the biggest driver for speciation was just reproductive isolation, so unguided genetic drift can make the two sides incompatible.

basil-rash 2y ago
The bizarre intermediary forms are specifically those that do not appear, and that would make no evolutionary sense to exist. Things like feathers. Now, evolutionists will come up with fanciful untested (untestable), unobserved (unobservable) narratives in attempt to jam such cases into their world view – and that's all well and good, I do the same. I just don't pretend to call my interpretation scientific, I call it religious/faith-based. They'd do well to do the same.