> Once again, evolutionists report that an organism gained abilities it basically already had. There was no, new capabilities invented in the process. So, you might want to drop that one.

Maybe you can stop with the disingenuous "evolutionists" and just call these people by their professions: biologists and geneticists.

Feeding on citrate under aerobic conditions is a new capability for the e. coli strain that the experiment started with. You can deny it all you want but that just shows the world that you're closing your eyes for what is right in front of you. If it was really such an easy ability to acquire you'd think that more than 1 of the 12 lines would have achieved it after 75k+ generations. But researching the strain that did develop the ability showed that it's a complex ability that required multiple mutations to acquire. It's not like the bacteria just activated a dormant gene that they already had.

But we can leave the e. coli behind and take another example: antibiotic resistance in bacteria and the ability to digest plastic of some bacteria. Many antibiotics (and also plastics in general) simply didn't exist before we invented them. And yet we see bacteria develop a resistance to antibiotics. And now that plastic is everywhere, some bacteria have evolved the ability to break it down. Clearly these are new and original abilities.

> Most of what I saw in the past was them claiming that without proof. What they’d usually argue are similarities. Reuse of design, or iterations, happen in intelligent design done by human engineers. We reuse and tweak all kinds of stuff, esp mechanical and software. You don’t see people arguing an unguided, chance-based process must have produced the software because of the similarities in the code. Evolutionists take quite a leap.

So you're suggesting evolution isn't true, it's actually an intelligent designer that is iterating on a design, resulting in... the development of species over time with a fossil record and existing species that looks exactly like an evolutionary tree, including physical traits, similarity in genetics... but it's definitely not evolution.

Speaking of reuse of design, in nature we actually see that something like (for example) the eye has evolved separately a bunch of times, with several variations. And miraculously these variations match the evolutionary trees for the species involved.

> You said vestigial. That’s another thing I’m skeptical of. Scientists that don’t understand our bodies have said many things were useless in the past. Then, evolutionists said they were vestigial. Later, the appendix, the spleen, “junk DNA,” etc were proven to have important uses for people even though you can live without some of them.

When I was talking about vestigial stuff I had the leg bones in some snakes in mind, that seem to VERY STRONGLY suggest that their ancestors may have had legs, and these legs have evolved away. Whales also have some bones left that again strongly suggest their ancestors once walked on land, but one could argue about whether these count as 'vestigial' since apparently some muscles are still connected to them. But regardless of vestigiality, they're clearly remains of legs.

> Vestigial organs seem to be one of those things where evolutionists don’t know why something exists, make a statement of faith that it’s vestigial, and then use the faith-based statements (existence of vestigials) to back evolution theory itself. I don’t like that methodology since they’ve been wrong so many times.

So you agree the scientific consensus updates as more information becomes available, as we see with vestigial organs losing their vestigial status when their use becomes known. And yet evolution has not been rejected by scientists. To me that sounds like the new information did not contradict evolution. Does it sound like a grand conspiracy to you?

> Same as before. There’s similarities. So, instead of designed with similarities (most likely), it must have been produced by unguided processes in hostile environments that endlessly added more capabilities starting with simple things they spontaneously formed from non-living material in a universe that accidentally formed life-preserving constants.

The origin of life is out of scope of evolution, so I don't see why you're bringing it up. Evolution would still be the leading theory about the historical and continued development of terrestrial life regardless of whether the first life arose from nonliving materials, was brought to earth by aliens, or was created by a deity from your pantheon of choice.

> Yet, even those that believe this won’t rely on such processes to design anything because they don’t work. Even evolutionary algorithms and large, language models take lots of fine-tuning in environments hand-crafted for their execution. Why would I expect anything less of the more complex designs in the universe and of life? :)

Because it's faster? Somewhere out there in the world is a tree with a branch that is perfectly shaped to be part of a hammer. But when I need a hammer I won't grow a billion trees and find the one with the best shaped branch, I'll take a slightly bigger branch and cut it in the shape I like. Here we come back to the fact that evolution takes many generation and it's essentially random, so IF you have the option of taking the role of an intelligent designer, that is often the quickest way to get stuff done.