There are many video makers who have done a great job of explaining evolutionary theory for the benefit of creationists. Aron Rahr's foundational falsehoods of creationism comes to mind and contains a wealth of relevant information. This video is aimed at the type of creationists I've been swapping comments with recently. It becomes increasingly frustrating when the questions you have already answered get asked again and again, and as the thinking atheist would say, the creationist is sending but not receiving. It's obvious that they have never bothered to learn how evolution works, not even on Wikipedia. And they repeat the same straw man arguments contained on websites such as Answers and Genesis and the Way of the Master, Over and Over. The professional creationists, the ones who make money by selling books and DVDs and charging entrance fees to anti-scientific theme parks, are praying, not praying, on the gullible and ill informed. It's sad, but a lot of that sort of trickery goes on in this world. So, for the benefit of the creationist who wants to try to persuade non-creationists that creationism is accurate and correct, please pay close attention to the following facts about the theory of evolution. Also, please note that you don't have to believe it's true to know what it is and how it works. The first thing we need to do is to recognise that the theory of evolution is not a biogenesis, nor is it cosmology, nor is it atheism. These are different subjects and although there is some overlap, they should not be confused. They should not be mixed together and given the label evolutionism. A biogenesis is a hypothesis about how life originated. Charles Darwin's most famous book was called on the Origin of Species, not on the origin of life. Try to remember this. Because cosmology includes the Big Bang theory which describes the expansion of the universe. Atheists are people who don't believe that gods are real. That's all atheists have in common. Some atheists understand cosmology, a biogenesis and evolution, others don't. There is no requirement for atheists to learn about these things. There are no commandments or threats of punishment for not believing that there are no gods or reward for believing there are no gods. There is no dogma in atheism. There is also no requirement for atheists to read the Bible, though many of us have. Many of them become atheists because they read the Bible and found that it was unbelievable and unconvincing. The theorem is not a religion, even though many creationists insist that it is. Evolution isn't a religion either. It's a scientific theory. Other scientific theories include atomic theory, germ theory and the theory of gravity. Scientific theories, not to be confused with hypotheses, make predictions which can be tested and have been verified. It makes no sense that creationists accept what scientists say about atoms, germs and gravity but reject what they say about evolution. The vast majority of scientists accept that evolution is true. So when certain creationists claim that there is a controversy within science, they are either being dishonest or profoundly ignorant. So what exactly is evolution? How does the theory work? Evolution describes the change of species over time. Not within the lifetimes of a plant or animal, but from one generation to the next. Everyone knows that children are not identical to their parents. They are similar, but not identical. The DNA from both parents is combined in the offspring. The copying process is good, but not perfect. So variations occur as do mutations which don't normally lead to beneficial traits or characteristics, but occasionally they do. These beneficial traits apply to all species and can lead to a longer beak or thick of fur, which means that the individuals of whichever species are better adapted to survive and reproduce in a particular environment and will pass on these characteristics to their offspring. And so it goes from one generation to the next. These small changes are recognised by creationists as microevolution. For some reason they don't seem to be able to understand that small changes extrapolated over long periods of time and thousands of generations mean that the species at the beginning and the end of this sequence might be so different that they could no longer interbreed. This is how we determine what a species is. Biologists have studied the species of plants, animals, bacteria, fungi and so on, which are alive today, and they have been able to reverse engineer and figure out how this process works. Populations can be separated geographically, on an island for example, or by a mountain range. And if this separation persists for long enough and each population gradually adapts to a different environment, they will come a point when they could no longer interbreed. At this point what used to be one population of one species has evolved to become two distinct populations of different species. The original population, specifically the parents which had two offspring who went different ways, are called the common ancestor. We now know that all life on earth is related. Darwin predicted this, and the more recent discovery and study of DNA has confirmed this. Every species today shares a common ancestor with every other species. In a way we are all distant cousins. This is what the evolutionary tree of life describes. It is a simplified family tree, only showing examples of species separated by thousands or millions of generations and geographical separation. We are animals, whether creationists like it or not. We are a species of ape and our closest cousins are the chimpanzees. Their DNA is more similar to ours than any other animal. The common ancestor of the chimpanzee and modern humans is an ape which looked something like this and lived on the earth about 6 or 7 million years ago. The fact that the Bible doesn't even mention chimpanzees might have something to do with a limited knowledge of the men who wrote it, all those years ago in the Middle East. The fact that the biblical story of creation differs from reality based scientific observation is interesting. Logically speaking they can't both be right. Creationists claim that the Bible is 100% true, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence to the country. My understanding of the world and application of logic and reason won't allow me to believe that an old book is more true than the conclusions of very smart people who have dedicated their careers to studying the natural world and figuring out how it works. That was a very brief description of some of the basics of evolutionary theory which creationists don't seem to know about. If any creationists have made it this far, thank you for your attention and I sincerely hope you learned something. Before I go I'd like to thank Wildwood Claire and her fat ass cats for the recent shout-out. If any of you don't know who Claire is please find the link in the description, enjoy her videos and say hi from me. Thanks also to my new subscribers and those who have stuck with me. There are almost a thousand of you know which feels like some kind of milestone. I'll also put some links for anyone wishing to learn more about evolution. Creationists please check them out and learn what evolutionary biologists are saying and compare how different this is to what you learned from answers and genesis. Thank you for watching and see you in the next video.