by EGreg | 2025-12-28 16:38:02+00:00
You know, evolution people are some of the most confident bullshitters ever.

They like to tell people that if you don’t believe their theory, then you don’t believe science.

For such a long time they made fun of Lamarckian ideas as totally discredited, then once in a while stuff like this gets published and the scientists quoted say “we still don’t know how” it happens. Yeah but the orthodoxy is sure it can’t happen in any way than their theories say.

“Epigenetics” has become a socially safe word to acknowledge that “random” mutation and natural selection doesn’t explain everything. (That word “natural” is doing a lot of work there, by the way.)

The biggest thing is conflating all the theories under “evolution” as a catch-all term. The theory of common descent has a lot of evidence (like the phylogenic tree matching radiocarbon dating) so “evolution fans” latch on to that to literally shame anyone for eg questioning that ALL speciation happens by random mutation and natural selection. Regardless of any mathematical arguments, irreducibility arguments etc.

They’re like the bitcoin maxis of science.

They love to embrace “just-so” stories with no proof, as long as the story plausibly explains how a particular feature or phenomenon came about while sticking to ONLY random mutation and natural selection, they favor it.

Some of them even go so far as to say that ABIOGENESIS is happening on other planets and just throw a ton of time and planets at the problem. Keep in mind that abiogenesis requires reproduction, and the Kolmogorov complexity of the smallest replicating cell that can randomly mutate and reproduce for natural selection is astronomically high. But no matter. They will postulate proimordial soups with buckyballs, RNA world theories, etc. Just throw enough time and planets at it.

And if that doesn’t work, they’ll use the anthropic principle and postulate a multiverse with as many worlds as we need to explain fine-tuning of the universe! So things are the way they are because we are here to observe them. If a Richard Dawkins can’t overcome a mathematical objections their with enough planets, a fellow atheist Larry Krauss can help him out with any number of multiverses, the mindset is the same.

This is not science, people. This is a mindset. It would rather uncritically propagate “just-so” storiess with zero evidence for them, than look for actual alternative explanations. “It’s the best we can do”, they always say.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t weaponize this approach for decades to drive people out of academia or make sure they don’t get published if they question the orthodoxy.

PS: While the critique above says NOTHING about intelligent design, proponents of some kind of intelligent design have faced a frustrating sleight of hand for years. While they were derided for having a “god of the gaps” for their bias, a different bias went entirely unnoticed on the other side with the word “natural” in natural selection:

Any newly discovered mechanism can be absorbed retroactively as “natural”

But design-like explanations are excluded even if they would explain the data more compactly

This is not because they were tested and failed, but because they violate the methodological rule.

So the theory becomes:

“Whatever happened, happened naturally — and we define ‘natural’ as whatever happened.”

That makes the term unfalsifiable in principle