To be pedantic about it, the moths didn’t grow darker, the already-darker moths survived and reproduced more in darker-colored environments, until they out-numbered the lighter-colored ones, which did NOT disappear from nature, but only from polluted cities, and are now making a resurgence as sooty deposits decrease.
https://www.snexplores.org/article/how-moth-went-dark-side

I don’t think even ID proponents dispute the existence of natural selection and gene mutations; those are both self-evident (animal breeding over millennia) and well established (lab work).

What allows some mutations to lead to stable populations and reproduction has not AFAIK ever been explained; we just know that a few mutations do and the overwhelming majority don’t. Fiddling with DNA usually leads to early death or failure to even be born.

As you said, it’s the change in species and the complexity of mutations needed to do it in anything less than the life of the universe (which keeps getting longer IIRC) which is the sticking point.

However, cuing off multiverse theory and the anthropic principle, I might argue that we are in an universe which had a freakish number of freakish DNA accidents such that we came to exists.

Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here to notice and discuss it.

QED.

It’s clear minor evolution occurs — moths growing darker in environments with more soot.

But does that explain the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, or the evolution of tree shrews to human beings in sixty-odd million years?

I’m unpersuaded. Michael Behe’s book is a good start.

Darwinian evolutionists were dead certain of their paradigm. Cue Lynn Margulis.
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[In 1967] Lynn Margulis transformed and fundamentally framed current understanding of the evolution of cells with nuclei by proposing it to have been the result of symbiotic mergers of bacteria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis
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What we’re talking about here is the mitochondrion, the absolutely essential component of almost all eukaryote cells — which includes you and me.

Margulis faced stiff opposition from standard Darwinian Evolutionists but eventually she won the argument.

Which means, before Margulis, Darwinian Evolutionists had an unbridgeable gap in their evolution theory, but still assured us all they had it covered.

Well, maybe it’s a happy ending. The God of the Gaps is once more refuted — no thanks to the DEs of that day.

It still looks more complicated to me. Not that evolution is wrong, but incomplete.

That initial factoid (or not) mentioned in the video about lining Reese’s cups up to the moon and back clearly begs the question whether they are to be lined up as the visual suggested, edge to edge, or stacked along the z-axis. Would make a difference.

Should I take it as a regional dialect variant, or just as appalling ignorance, when I hear some people say the word “Reese’s” as “Ree-sees”? Similar to the feeling I get when I drive by a certain billboard that says product or education program XYZ “let’s you” do ABC. And to think someone put that up in two-foot-tall letters in public…. argh, argh, argh.

Chases Eagles, thanks for the update on the scaup. If it’s remaining local, do you think that’s because it’s injured, or could it have been sticking around locally before whatever happened that led to it being hit with that pellet? Do scaups migrate? Is this one interacting with the other ducks at all? It sounds like you have an interesting group of residents there.

I don’t think that’s the case. The biologists feel very threatened by fundamental Christianity and as a result think they need to defend DE at all costs. My mention of one biologist who recognized the issues with DE shows they know what the cracks in theory are. But they think that if they show any weakness at all then they will lose the war with ID.

One also has to remember that biology is a young science that also deals with incredibly complicated systems; at least compared to physics. Also, physics has a history (once called Natural Philosophy) of not being totally divorced from philosophical/religious ideas. Biology has no such history. No one in biology, that I know of, unlike Einstein, has said they “want to know God’s thoughts”.

My interest in DE began with discussions with biology colleagues before I retired. Except for one notable person, all adhered religiously to the DE sacrament. I put it in religious terms as their attitude struck me that way instead of what I assumed would be a more scientific attitude given that they are scientists. Any questioning of DE, in their view, had to come from kooky, antiscience Christians. So, they circle the wagons and allow nothing in.

I had no problem with their questions about QM as us physicists also have many of the same questions. However, my questions as scientist, but not a biologist, about DE was met with hostility. It’s sad. Such an attitude can only hurt biology. Even if the basic picture of DE is correct, blindly not even considering some of the “holes” in the theory holds back progress in the field.

*The historian Tom Holland ended his book Dominion with claims of not being a believer even though he fully acknowledged the role of Christianity on making our Western culture and eventual social and political environment. I recently saw something that suggested that perhaps after many interviews and public presentations, he has now become a believer – but I am not quite sure on that.

Enough for a Saturday night. 🙂 And peace to all who follow the Golden Rule.